Draft 2025 Urban Water Management Plan

2025 Orange County Water Demand Projection Model

Expectations about

Log Transformed?

Explanatory Variable

Description

Coefficient Estimates

Economic theory suggests positive correlation of income with demand; generally geographical areas with higher median incomes tend to use more water. Positively correlated with demand; generally, residences with more people tend to use larger amounts of water

Positive sign (commonly between 0 and 1)

Median income

Yes

Positive sign (commonly between 0 and 1)

Persons per household

Yes

Reflects the effect of drought restrictions

Water Use Restrictions

No

Negative sign

Most explanatory variables are log-transformed because some variables are orders of magnitude larger than others (for example, income is in the tens of thousands of dollars while monthly precipitation may be smaller than 1 inch). Log transformation compresses the large values and spreads out smaller ones, balancing the data and facilitating the regression’s ability to interpret how each variable affects demand.

3.3 Single-family Regression Development

This section reviews the development of the statistical regression for the single-family residential sector.

3.3.1

Explanatory Variables and Fitted Coefficients

The fit for the final single-family regression is presented in Table 3-3 . While all coefficients are generated with the panel regression approach, Hazen relied on experience and the model fitting process to allows some coefficients to vary by agency (shown as a range of values) and restricted some to be constant across all agencies (and a single value is shown in Table 3-3). Coefficient estimates are within the expected range for all explanatory variables).

3-7

Appendix G - 44

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