Discover Patterns: Overseas arrival in Australia

Hi there,
As there has been a lot of talk about the population of Australia and the people migrating here, I thought it would be a good idea to do a quick analysis on how people have migrated into Australia in the last few years.
Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes data for migrants to Australia. I used the data to try and explain the trends and patterns behind the data since 1983.

Permanent and Long term Arrivals:

Looking at the time series graph since 1983, we see that there is certainly a good increase in number of permanent and long term arrivals in Australia.

Infact, month of February gets a lot of new arrivals, whilst in May, very few people arrive in Australia.

There has been a significant increase in the number of Arrivals in the last few years. Year 2008 and 2009 has seen a significant increase  with an average of more than 50K arrivals, before 2007, it was less than 40K arrivals.

Permanent Residents:
The country of origin definitely defines the cultural mix of a country. Let us look at the country of origin of permanent settlers in Australia.

Cultural Mix:
Based on the data from Australian Bureau of Statistics, in the last few years, there has been a decline in people coming from the following countries:
1. Europe
2. UK
3. New Zealand

There has been an increase in the people arriving from the following countries:
1. China
2. Sri Lanka
3. India
4. North East Asia

Total Arrivals:
Each month there are more than a million arrivals in Australia. This includes people visiting Australia for a short-term visit (tourists), long-term visit (1yr and more) and a few permanent residents. This number has significantly increased (by 30%) for each month since 2003.

Let us do a small time-series forecasting in order to see how many visitors will be arriving in Australia in the next few months (25 months).

I used Simple Exponential Smoothing  model in order to forecast the future arrivals.

I could estimate that there would be around 1.12m people visiting each month if everything remains the same.

The 95% Confidence Interval ranges between 950K to 1.35m, which means that the forecast may range between the above values.

Thus, the data explains that the number of visitors and permanent residents are on a high increase and the recent past they have increased even further. It will need a lot of planning to accommodate the people and build infrastructure for the people so that they have a pleasant experience in the land of kangaroos.

Hope the above article helps.

Disclaimer: The above data is taken from the Australia Bureau of Statistics and this post is a mere representation of data.

Join the conversation on LinkedIn (shameless plug: Shailendra Kumar) and Twitter (Shailendra Kumar), share your thoughts