Analysis of residential natural gas consumption distribution function in Korea - a mixture model

The world's overall need for natural gas (NG) has been growing up fast, especially in the residential sector. The better the estimation of residential NG consumption (RNGC) distribution, the better decision-making for a residential NG policy such as pricing, demand estimation, management options and so on. Approximating the distribution of RNGC is complicated by zero observations in the sample. To deal with the zero observations by allowing a point mass at zero, a mixture model of RNGC distributions is proposed and applied. The RNGC distribution is specified as a mixture of two distributions, one with a point mass at zero and the other with full support on the positive half of the real line. The model is empirically verified for household RNGC survey data collected in Korea. The mixture model can easily capture the common bimodality feature of the RNGC distribution. In addition, when covariates were added to the model, it was found that the probability that a household has non-expenditure significantly varies with some variables. Finally, the goodness-of-fit test suggests that the data are well represented by the mixture model.