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Accurately forecasting daily hotel occupancy is critical for revenue managers. Limited research focuses on predicting daily hotel occupancy by implementing traditional forecasting techniques, which only require a little statistical knowledge or expensive software for small independent properties. This study employs longitudinal daily occupancy data from multiple properties in urban settings within the United States to test four forecasting models for short-term (1–90 day) predictions. The results showed that Simple Exponential Smoothing (SES) was most accurate for four horizons, while Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) was better for shorter-term predictions in the other seven. In conclusion, these results demonstrate that small independent properties may successfully implement traditional forecasting methods for accurate daily occupancy forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paciorek and Wehner raise important questions around our use of the Mann‐Kendall nonparametric trend test on smoothed data for analyzing long‐term hydrometeorological trends in Zhang et al. (2021, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020gl092293). We thank them for initiating this important conversation and their gracious cooperation in exploring the issues addressed in their comment. In this reply we confirm the inflation of significant p‐values by our choice to smooth, illustrate the relatively minor impacts on the main conclusions of our paper, and add our voices to those of Paciorek and Wehner in highlighting the lack of methodology for hypothesis testing across multiple stations that have spatial structure (i.e., testing for regionally consistent trends). Plain Language Summary: Our colleagues Drs. Paciorek and Wehner have raised concerns about our paper (Zhang et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020gl092293), which showed widespread increases in the duration of drought events over the last five decades in the western United States. They point out that our decision to smooth the data using a moving average inflated the number of weather stations at which the trends toward longer droughts were deemed significant by a statistical test. We agree with them on this point, and we have recomputed all our results using unsmoothed data to determine the impacts. We find that for most stations and regions, trend magnitudes remained largely unchanged, with many stations nearby one another often suggesting similar trends. Finally, we agree with Paciorek and Wehner that there is a lack of statistical methods to test such coherent regional patterns, and we caution that over‐reliance on p‐values limits the power of regional data to identify important climate trends. Key Points: We agree that smoothing to 5‐year moving windows introduced serial correlation into time series of annual statistics of daily rainfall data, inflating the number of weather stations individually showing significant trends (p < 0.05) with the Mann‐Kendall testRecomputation with unsmoothed values produced substantially the same dry intervals trend magnitude and direction at most stations individually and had only minimal impacts on dry interval trends computed for National Ecological Observatory Network domains using the Regional Kendall testNo perfect statistical approach leverages the capacity of coherent regional patterns among spatially correlated weather stations, and an over‐reliance on p‐values as a binary (significant vs. insignificant) determinant of trends limits the power of regional data [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media regarding COVID-19 fatality counts is crucial, affecting policy and health measures nationwide. However, misinformation regarding other causes of death has led to dubious claims about the seriousness of the coronavirus. This research aims to identify the changes in a dozen causes of death during the pandemic using CDC data from 1999 to 2020. Using the Exponential Triple Smoothing (ETS) algorithm, this project estimated the mortality of eleven causes of death for 2020 under the assumption of no COVID-19 pandemic. Using Power BI and Tableau, this data was visualized together with 2020 actual death counts to determine which causes of death were significantly impacted by the coronavirus. The dashboard revealed an increase in several causes of death including Alzheimer's Disease and Diabetes, a decrease in Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease deaths, and a slight increase in Influenza deaths. These findings, while at odds with much of the media surrounding COVID-19 mortality, are corroborated by adjacent scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important problem in network analysis is the online detection of anomalous behaviour. In this paper, we introduce a network surveillance method bringing together network modelling and statistical process control. Our approach is to apply multivariate control charts based on exponential smoothing and cumulative sums in order to monitor networks generated by temporal exponential random graph models (TERGM). The latter allows us to account for temporal dependence while simultaneously reducing the number of parameters to be monitored. The performance of the considered charts is evaluated by calculating the average run length and the conditional expected delay for both simulated and real data. To justify the decision of using the TERGM to describe network data, some measures of goodness of fit are inspected. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by an empirical application, monitoring daily flights in the United States to detect anomalous patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]