The goal of this project was to look at Google search interest for cities, towns, and other places in the Northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan along with the Upper Peninsula. Key discoveries during the original analysis phase were that search interest for most of these places is extremely seasonal with most search interest during the summer due to tourism. Search interest for some places exhibits a correlation with unseasonable weather patterns. However, this relationship is generally different between the summer and winter months. Places growing in search interest include many in the less populated areas of the northeastern portion of the Lower Peninsula and moderately populated areas along Lake Michigan and the Wisconsin border of the Upper Peninsula. Much of this growing interest is from Northern Michigan population centers such as Traverse City and Marquette, not the southern Michigan areas commonly associated with tourists.

I currently produce three-month forward forecasts for search interest each month. Search interest data is from Google trends which is acquired using the pytrends python package. Forecasts consider search interest values for 141 Lower Peninsula and 71 Upper Peninsula places and their historical seasonality and relationship with various temperature, precipitation, and snowfall related variables and forecasts acquired from weather.gov and accuweather.com. The relationship with weather variables and between individual places and aggregate peninsula search interest is determined using basic machine learning models (linear models using lasso/ridge regularization).

This is the final summary for the original analysis phase of this project followed by a basic description of how the current three-month forecasts are created and a discussion of the characteristics and limitations of the models. I have many other documents I shared on linkedin and other materials related to this project that might be available upon request. The monthly forecasts are shared as blogposts on this website.

note: As of 10/13/2024, I added a final addendum discussing the fall in Upper Peninsula search interest for 2024, in addition to the final summary and methods summary.