Kagiso-Gabaatlhole/south-african-cost-of-living-intelligence
Domaine:
socioeconomicType de record:
project
Créateur:
Kag
Hôte:
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 …