Kagiso-Gabaatlhole/south-african-cost-of-living-intelligence

End-to-end data science platform for measuring, modelling, forecasting and simulating household cost-of-living pressure across South Africa using the IES 2022/23 dataset. # South African Cost-of-Living Intelligence Platform > **End-to-end data-science pipeline for measuring, modelling, forecasting and simulating household cost-of-living pressure across South Africa.** This project analyses the **Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) Income and Expenditure Survey (IES) 2022/23** to understand which households face the greatest cost-of-living pressure and how that pressure could change under future inflation and policy scenarios. The project is designed as a reproducible portfolio project: raw survey tables are transformed into an analytical household-level dataset, followed by statistical analysis, visualisation, clustering, predictive modelling, forecasting and scenario simulation. --- ## Project Highlights | Component | Approach | |---|---| | Data integration | Merge 5 IES fact tables | | Feature engineering | 20+ household-level indicators | | Cost-of-living index | Composite 0–100 pressure score | | Statistical analysis | Weighted summaries, Kruskal–Wallis and point-biserial analysis | | Segmentation | K-Means clustering with silhouette-based selection | | Predictive modelling | Random Forest regression | | Forecasting | 5-year expenditure projections | | Policy analysis | 13 what-if intervention scenarios | | Visual analytics | 22 publication-quality figures | | Reproducibility | Configurable data paths + automated tests | --- ## Key Findings The current pipeline produces the following headline results: - **Eastern Cape urban-informal households** have the highest pressure among province/settlement combinations, with an average pressure score of **56.4/100**. - Approximately **44.6% of households** have expenditure exceeding income in the scenario-analysis baseline. - A **10% increase in household income** reduces mean modelled pressure by approximately **2.8 points**. - **Transport expenditure** has the highest projected growth among the major expenditure categories, increasing by approximately **40.3%** from 2022/23 to 2 …