U.S. Power Outages — DSC 80

Overview

Two-person DSC 80 project (with Paulina Pelayo) analysing 1,534 major U.S. power outages from 2000–2016 across 53 features from the DOE. Covered the full data-science arc: cleaning and timestamp reconciliation, NMAR missingness reasoning, permutation tests, and predictive modelling. Found severe weather drives the longest outages, fuel-supply emergencies are rare but disruptive, and higher residential electricity prices correlate with shorter restoration times (p ≈ 0.007) — suggesting greater grid-reliability investment. Random Forest regressor with log-transformed population density and a severe-weather indicator reached RMSE 6,189 min and R² 0.220, with fairness checks across weather vs. non-weather outages.