Scenario

You work as a junior analyst in market research company and have been asked by your line manager, a senior data analyst to support with the following task.

Task

Your organisation has been approached by a newspaper column editor and asked if your company can write an article on "The value of data on domestic property market". The newspaper column aims at providing readers with insights about the local residential property market.

You are tasked with researching and preparing this short piece of article which will be published in their newspaper column and their website.

You are required to cover the following within the article:

What is data and why is it important? What is the relationship between data, information and knowledge providing illustrations and examples where appropriate.

Evaluate the differences between descriptive and inferential statistics.

Make recommendations and judgements on how statistical process control can improve business performance and business planning.

An analysis and evaluation of the recent local domestic property prices using the open-source data published by the Rating and Valuation Department of the HKSAR government through the DATA.GOV.HK website:

https://data.gov.hk/en-data/dataset/hk-rvd-tsinfo_rvd-property-market-statistics

To better understand the definitions of the data, you will refer to the data explanation file provided by the department:

https://www.rvd.gov.hk/datagovhk/Data_Dic.pdf

Your line manager has specified the following file for your work which is downloadable in CSV format in the following links:

http://www.rvd.gov.hk/datagovhk/1.2M.csv

The file contains historical data on average monthly domestic property prices classified by class (A to E) and region (HK, KLN and NT).

However, the work will focus ONLY on domestic property prices of classes A, B and C, and include

Present in a table, the central tendence and the variability (e.g., mean/median, IQR/standard deviation) of the monthly average private domestic property prices for classes A to C on all different regions from year 2016 to year 2020.

Create a suitable a bar chart to present the quarterly average private domestic property prices from year 2016 to year 2020 for classes A to C on all different regions.

Obtain the (time series) line plot of the quarterly average private domestic property prices from year 2016 to year 2020 (averaging over classes A, B, C and regions HK, KLN and NT).

Apply a suitable test (e.g., T-Test, ANOVA, chi-square) to find out if the quarter seasons have effects on the domestic property prices on different regions by considering the data over the years from 2016 to 2020. State possible assumptions.

Provide some brief comments to readers about the future private domestic property prices.