Gas Prices in Ontario

A friend, Michael Lieff pointed this nice set of data out. It is the price of gas in several Ontario cities going as far back as 1990. This is an interesting data set as the price of gas, in general, increases but you can see that that wasn't always the case (only a few of the cities are shown below).

Analysis

When you go to this website you have several options for prices and you can download a year of data at a time (with a CSV as an option). The obvious choice is regular gasoline but you might want to consider things like comparing regular gas to alternative fuels like propane. For example in this case, you can see that, in general, propane also has risen in price over time but where gasoline seems to fluctuate similarly regardless of the city, propane seems to be more volatile depending on location.

Because of the shear amount of data points possible (you can get a weekly average for the last 25 years for several cities if you want), you may wish to stick to yearly values. Another option is to use some of he weekly values to talk about the dangers of extrapolation

Download the Data

Site http://www.energy.gov.on.ca/en/fuel-prices/
I have also taken the liberty of downloading all of the data for gasoline (all 25 years of it) in weekly, monthly and yearly form. As well as the yearly propane data. You can get it on this Google sheet (note the tabs) or just the gas prices on Fathom

Let me know if you used this data set or if you have suggestions of what to do with it beyond this.

The Data and Story Library - DASL

DASL (pronounced "dazzle") is the Data and Story Library is an awesome database of sets of data that are specifically to help teach topics of statistics. They are all real sets and are all categorized by topic/subtject (eg automotive, food, health, sports etc) and mathematical method (eg boxplots, mean, outliers, regression, scatterplots etc). So theoretically if you wanted to find a set of data that could be used to help teach a specific topic you could search for, say, "correlation"
These are some great data sets to get through the mechanical nature of statistics. It's not very current data but it's great for practicing statistical methods.
For the longest time this set of data was not available but just recently it was hosted by Data Description Inc. so now we have access to it again.

Analysis

There are far too many sets to talk about analysis but when the site was down I blogged about one of my favourite sets on Smoking and Cancer. Take a look at that post to get a sense of the data. When you get to any data set, to see the actual data file, click on the Datafile Name

This will show you the text file of the data with the download link at the top of the page.
From that point you can do the analysis. Each data set will have a detailed description of each variable and a short story and sample analysis of each set
There are many data sets on this site for every statistical topic and on a range of subjects. One thing you might have your students do is just explore on this site and find data sets that can be used to exemplify a particular statistical concept.

Download the Data

Site: http://dasl.datadesk.com/ 

Let me know if you used this data set or if you have suggestions of what to do with it beyond this.