I’ve been working on a project lately to predict hotel cancellations using machine learning. Hotel cancellations are a significant pain point for the industry – the inherent unpredictability of cancellations leads to lost revenue and inefficient pricing of hotel rooms.

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Using a public dataset for Portuguese hotels, I used SVM and ARIMA to 1) predict whether a customer would cancel based on select features (or customer attributes), and 2) determine the weekly fluctuations in cancellations. The latter involved significant data manipulation in pandas to structure all the data in weekly format, and ultimately the SVM demonstrated an AUC of 0.74, while SARIMA demonstrated an MDA (mean directional accuracy) of 81%.

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You can find the write-up and repository here. Would be grateful for any feedback!