I am hoping this is still a work in progress, but I am going ahead and putting up the current results. I started this project basically because I (and everyone else) notice huge jumps upward in gas prices but not downward, and basically for no apparent reasons. So, this project is partly to see how closely tied to oil prices gas really is and second just as a programming exercise in Python and its graph capabilities. Overall it appears that, in terms of % change since 1997, gas pretty much follows oil at the high level. I started at 1997 because that is when the government sources I got the data from become consistent for both data sets. See the graph for more information and here are some simple statistics. Although the average upward changes are higher, they are not enough to be that significant. Similarly, the max upward changes are close to the max downward (which I call min change below) changes; oil's downward change even beats out the upward. Note that oil is in $/barrel and gas is cents/gallon.
- Max oil change: 9.17
- Min oil change: -11.85
- Avg oil change up: 0.691491628615
- Avg oil change down: 0.626773211568
- Max gas change: 45.9
- Min gas change: -33.3
- Avg gas change up: 1.74642313546
- Avg gas change down: 1.54368340944
To read more about the programming end see my
KuhlTech blog and check out the code on my
main site.
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