Analysis of Fuel Prices in Australia

Statistics
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24th May 2019

1. Section 1: Introduction
a. Brief introduction
Fluctuations in the global oil prices greatly affect the prices of fuel in Australia. The
Australian energy policy is subject to the fiscal and regulatory influence of all the three
government levels, however, only the Federal and State levels are allowed to determine
the primary policy industries such as coal (Byrnes, Brown, Wagner, & Foster, 2016).
There have been reports that there are some petrol stations that sell petrol at higher prices
than the others. This study therefore sought to analyze the fuel prices for different petrol
stations in Australia.
a. Dataset 1:
This data is a secondary data where the data is obtained from a data that had been
collected earlier on. There are six variables in this dataset where the variables are of
different data types. Four of the variables are nominal variables while one variable is a
continuous variable (price) while the other variable is a discrete variable. There are 1000
cases in this dataset.
b. Dataset 2:
This dataset is a primary dataset since the data is collected one on one from the
respondents. This dataset has two variables (gender and preferred petrol station). The two
variables are nominal variables. There are 50 cases in this dataset.

2. Section 2: Analysis of single variable in Dataset 1.
a. Summary statistics of price
In this section, we present the summary statistics for the price. The results are presented
in the table below;
Table 1: Summary (descriptive) statistics
Price
Mean 123.371
Standard Error 0.403
Median 123.900
Mode 129.900
Standard Deviation 12.749
Sample Variance 162.525
Kurtosis -0.184
Skewness 0.101
Range 106.700
Minimum 78.900
Maximum 185.600
Sum 123370.900
Count 1000.000
Confidence Level (95.0%) 0.791
The table above (table 1) presents the summary statistics for petrol price where it can be
seen that the average fuel price is $123.37 with the most frequent price being $129.90
and the median price being $123.90. These measures are referred to measures of central
tendency (location) and as can be seen the median price is very close to the mean price
which shows that the data is close to a normal distribution. The standard deviation is
given as 12.749 which show not a wide variation of the data points from the mean. The
Skewness value is 0.101 (a value closer to zero), which further confirms that the
distribution of the petrol price is close to normal distribution.