Group 8 Overview

Proposal

Poster

Application

Report

Background

CPI

The Consumer Price Index (CPI), is a critical indicator to assess the consumer price inflation. To profile the weighted average price changes for households' cost of living, Singapore's CPI adopts a fixed basket of residents' commonly consumption goods and services. About 6,600 brands/varieties from 4,200 outlets are selected in the 2014-based CPI (the dataset for our study). In basket level, the composition of goods and services can be categorized into 10 major divisions, which are listed below:

Food, Clothing & Footwear, Housing & Utilities, Household Durables And Services, Health Care, 

Transport, Communication, Recreation & Culture, Education, Miscellaneous Goods & Services

To construct CPI, two main types of data are required - the price data of a sample of goods and services, and the weighting data to represent the shares of different divisions' expenditure. The price data is gathered through a combination of data collection modes, while the frequency of price collection depends on price behavior of the item. The weighting data is derived from the expenditure values collected in the Household Expenditure Survey, the latest one came from HES 2012/13, updated to 2014 values by taking into account price changes between 2012/13 and 2014.

As a Price index, CPI can also be affected by other types of costs in Singapore. Indicators like COE Bidding Price, Import and Export price index, Exchange Rates, are assumed to have interesting relationships with CPI which worth further study.

Exchange Rate

Singapore has adopted a market-oriented currency system since 1985. To ensure better control over economic measures such as inflation and import/export prices, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has been set up to monitor the various exchange rates between the Singapore Dollar (SGD) and other important countries who are Singapore's trading partners.

MAS allows the SGD to rise or fall against a secretive basket of currencies, only intervening when necessary to keep the particular exchange rate within an unspecified exchange rate policy band. The reason why there is sparse information about the basket of currencies and band value ranges is to deter any form of currency speculation. Based on the needs of the current appreciation or depreciation of the Singapore Dollar, MAS adjusts the slope, width and centre of this exchange rate policy band. The exchange rate that MAS targets is also trade-weighted, so the currencies of bigger trading partners of Singapore will bear more weight in the equation.

MAS policies and the floating exchange rates have great bearing upon Singapore's economic history and future, so it is beneficial to explore the deep repercussions that these changes bring to the country. Important information such as the Import/Export prices and Consumer Price Index can help to illustrate this complex economic relationship.

Export & Import Index

No matter how rich a country is, how small or big it is, it will never be totally independent from the rest and have everything it needs. As a strong advocate of free trade, Singapore has relatively few trade barriers. In 2016, Singapore is the 13th largest exporter ($353.3 billion), and 15th largest importer ($271.3 billion) in the world. It has strongly influenced the nation economy. Especially due to the geographical location and national conditions, most of the livelihood commodity in Singapore relies on import which affects civilian’s daily life.

Motivation

With the background knowledge in mind, our team would like to create an exploratory model that showcases these complex relationships of Singapore's CPI, exchange rates, import and export pricing throughout the years (1990-2017) visualized on the world map. Time-series visualization techniques would also be adopted to look for hidden data trends for analysis.

There are several reasons why we found this project interesting:

• Closer to our daily standards of living, we wanted to understand what are the existing factors that can impact a country's CPI and subsequently its impact on its citizens.
• One of the potential factors that impact CPI, we wanted to look at how exchange rates work in Singapore's context and how they are used to Singapore's advantage when trading with the country's trading partners.
• Since Singapore is heavily dependent on its imported consumer goods, we also wanted to investigate how import and export pricing works as a whole, as well as its involvement as a moving part of a country's full economic system.
• As an overall conclusion, we know that the above economic indicators are highly related and would like to combine them to receive any data insights in terms of time period trends.

Even though Singapore is a relatively young country, it is able to provide rich data to help us explore these interesting observations.

Objectives

1. Provide interactive platform to illustrate the relationship between Singapore's exchange rate information, Consumer Price Index and Import and Export markets.

2. Discover data insights using visualization and interactivity that cannot be easily represented using raw data.

3. Make use of freely available Singapore economic data to arouse the interests of potential viewers and increase their curiosity on our trading relationships with the country's important trading partners.

Data Source

<CPI> <COE>

Singapore MAS Exchange Rate Data can be retrieved from Singapore MAS website, and showcases denominations of S$ per 100 of selected foreign currencies. The data set can be obtained in weekly and monthly format from the year 1988-2017.

Singapore import/export statistic dataset is downloaded from CEIC database and sourced by International Enterprise Singapore & Department of Statistics.

The dataset contains monthly import & export value by commodity section from 1964 to 2017. In order to align with other datasets used in this project, the data before 1990 will be excluded from the list.

Deliverables

Wiki Page

The project's wiki page will focus primarily on delivering the project's background, data processing, data analysis, project poster and the project final report in a concise and easy-to-understand manner to the viewer.

For the wiki-based final Visual Analytics Application report, it should contain the following sections:

• Motivation of the application
• Review and critic on past works
• Design framework - A detailed description of the design principles used and data visualization elements built
• Demonstration - Sample test cases
• Discussion points:

1. What has the audience learned from the project?
2. What new insights or practices has the system enabled?
3. A full blown user study is not expected, but informal observations of use that help evaluate the system are encouraged.

• Future Works - A description of how the system could be extended or refined.
• Installation guide - including hardware configuration and software integration.
• Sample Installation Guide
• User Guide - Step-by-step guide on how to use the data visualization functions designed.

Poster

The project poster would provide an illustrated overview of the project.

Various sections would include:

• Background and problem statement
• Motivation for the project
• Project Approach
• Project Results
• Future Works

The poster will be designed with learnt visualization techniques, coupled with aesthetics to deliver the correct data insights to the intended audience.

Poster Dimensions:

• Size = ISO A1 (594 × 841mm or 23.39 × 33.11inci)
• Resolution = 300dpi or above (high-resolution)
• File format = jpeg

Poster will be uploaded to this wiki page and the project Dropbox before the poster presentation.

Presentation

A poster presentation of the final project will be in the form of a poster session and live demo. A laptop will be set up near our team poster and be used to explain the project. As the venue will be open to any esteemed guests and the general public, a 5-10 minute oral explanation and demonstration will be given to all who are interested in the poster and visualization application.

• Conference Venue: SIS SR B1-1 Basement 1
• Poster Venue: SIS Faculty and Student Lounge Basement 1.
• Date/Time: 2nd December 2017 9:00am-6:00pm

Visual Analytics Artifact

Main packages used will be Tinyverse, ggplot2 and R Shiny.

Analysis will be provided in the form of an interactive visualization platform.

Users will be able to make changes to various parameters to do self-exploratory analysis.

Supplementary graphs and charts will be used to showcase the various differences and correlations of data.

References

1. https://secure.mas.gov.sg/msb/ExchangeRates.aspx

2. https://insights-ceicdata-com.libproxy.smu.edu.sg/Untitled-insight/views