Visual Autolytics

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Proposal

Project Application

Research Paper

Poster

Project Introduction

A recent news article highlights Singapore's struggle between owning cars and taking public transportation. "The Big Read: Despite push for public transport, a love for cars endures" The government has been making a conscientious effort to promote the utilization of the public transport and dissuade the public from driving. Apart from improving the transport system, there are deterrent measures such as a Certificate of Entitlement (COE) bidding system, high carpark rates, high taxes and the dreaded ERPs.

Out of these factors, the COE not only takes up the largest proportion of income spent on cars, its significant fluctuations are discussed the most frequently with a bid occurring every twice a month. Data Autolytics serves to explore the relationship between the existing COE prices and public transport. With our current infrastructure, are people really be dissuaded by even higher COE prices? Or does the government need to have more pull factors to woo people to using the public transport?

Motivation and Target Audience

The push for more quantifiable analysis in Singapore have made current resources data-rich but information poor. Presently, there are many sources of fragmented datasets on the vehicle population. There is a need for policy makers, industry professionals and the everyday Singaporean to be able to easily access understand the transport landscape before they make informed decisions on policies or drive for change. To be able to do so, they need to be able to access the data from a central location and have the numbers tell a story in a way which they can easily understand and analyse. By piecing the parts together, we hope to give a more complete picture and help our audiences make more informed decisions.

We aim to deliver an interactive web application that allows someone to easily access and navigate a large amount of time-series data.

Our intended audiences are:

1. Car suppliers dealers to make better forecasts
2. Prospective car buyers
3. Government and policy makers regarding vehicle overpopulation

Objectives

In this project, we will be focusing on the following:

• Different price sensitivities of car buyers
• The market share of car brands
• The proportion of transport expenditure to the transport tax revenue collected
• The effectiveness of COE prices in encouraging public transport ridership

Background Survey of Related Works

Related Works	Relevant and Useful Features
Time-series Scatterplot	Shows trend over times Colours show different dimensions Size shows quantity
An interactive treemap indicating importers' revenue of different countries	Colour indicates different continents, eg. Asia, Europe, North America etc. Size indicates proportion of sales amount in the market Hovering over the area indicates more detailed information Provides a high level view of our data and displaying the item details at the same time. It allows us to see patterns quickly when our eyes visually aggregate rectangles in the same group.
An analysis of the trend of coe in a bar chart representation	Use line graph to compare the changes of COE prices over the years. Bar chart indicates the different COE prices over time
Parallel Coordinates	Provides an overview of the breakdown of data in categories hierarchically. Colour can be used to highlight hierarchical groupings or specific categories. Shows car brand proportion accurately
Web Application Layout	The story was pieced together with the end in mind This format not only allowed space for data visualisation, but also gave context to the entire project

Proposal of StoryBoard

Proposed Visualization	Explanation
Section 1 - Overview of Car Market Visualising the Car Market Market Share of Car Brands	The overview of the Singapore's private vehicle market will be shown in "Visualising the Car Market" and the "Market Share of Car Brands" these two time series visualisations will give an overview of the customer demand of car brands and the varying car brand market share over time. User interactivity include: Playing the visualization to show the different car brand quantities changing over time. We can focus on car brands and learn about their COE price elasticity and changing market share.
Section 2 - Private and Public Transport Tax Expenditure Public and Private Transport	The next two visualisations will explore the relationship between expenditure of the COE as transport tax and whether the transport policies which are implemented with the COE tax revenue are effective. User interactivity includes: brushing over specific timeframes to zoom in on the trends.

Datasets

Dataset/Source	Data Attribute	Rationale of Usage
New Registration of Cars (Jan 2002 to Aug 2017) https://insights-ceicdata-com.libproxy.smu.edu.sg/Untitled-insight/myseries	Car brands Month and Year Number of registered cars	This dataset will be used to understand the current trend of the car market in Singapore
COE Price Data Set	Bidding Exercise Announcement Date Year Category Quota Quota Premium Total Bids Received Number of Successes	This dataset will be used to track the car demand of the consumers and their willingness to buy a car in Singapore
Car Prices by Model One Motoring By Car Make	Serial No. Make Model Bidding Round Total Basic Cost (S$) Total Basic Cost (With COE) (S$) Average Selling Price by Authorised Dealer (S$) Average Selling Price by Authorised Dealer (With COE) (S$)	This dataset will be used to track the car demand of the consumers and their willingness to buy a car in Singapore
Public Transport Ridership	Month Year Average Monthly Bus Ridership Average Monthly Train Ridership	This dataset will be used for the visualisation of the correlation between public transport ridership growth and COE price growth

Technical Challenges

Technical Challenges	Mitigation Plan
Obtaining datasets	Go through databases provided by the library Enlist help from Professor Kam for CIEC access to data
Acquiring Data, Data Cleaning	Plan the cleaning process and work closely to clean and analyse all data sources
Using d3.js and Highchart to display the visualisations which we want	Attend D3 Programming Workshop Designated time and roles on learning on D3 and HighCharts Libraries & Technical Tools Peer Learning
Unfamiliarity in Implementing Interactivity and Animation Tools/Techniques in Visualization App	Develop a Storyboard Different specialisation on Interactivity/Animation Techniques Referred to existing data visualisations for implementation

Project Timeline

Technologies and Tools

Our team has decided to focus on the following tools and libraries to create the visualisations and analysis

• D3.js
• Tableau
• Notepad++
• Adobe PhotoShop

Architectural Diagram

References

• What influences COE prices?: https://www.gov.sg/factually/content/what-influences-coe-prices
• D3.js: https://d3js.org/
• CEIC Database: https://www.ceicdata.com/en

Comments

Please share with us your feedback! :)

Prof In class review: Project intro and motivation need review, get a full appreciation of data, data rich - information poor, need effort to consolidate. Technically this data is someone who collected through various sources to put it through LTA, consolidated info in LTA repo, one of this web data service provider, they actually subscribe to LTA, they distribute through their paid portal, unless you know a query search for vertical form. Need effort to organize it to do a proper analysis. Understand how the structure of data looks like, to create data visualization. The current data structure of what you download from CEIC, dont have hierarchical structure, so need to reorganize the data in hierarchy ways to have hierarchical structure. Organize data to be in line with visualization else cant realise it. Be more specific in the motivation. Data sets are generic cant see the real data, need provide screenshot to see how it looks like. Reviewing diff is good. Timeline need to be updated. Tech and tools need review.