Multiple Regression and Model Building

Questions you need to answer:

1. What factors appear to influence beverage sales at the Westar?
2. Should Westar consider re-hiring the piano player for the Pour Nous Lounge?
3. How about happy hour food?
4. Can you suggest a new forecasting method for Jane to try out?
5. Explain what is Multicollinearity

CASE:
The Westar hotel, a 250-room business hotel located in a resort area of Colorado Rockies, has two lounges on its premises: the Pour Nous Lounge, a pub-style lounge that seats about 50, and Gaiete, a 200-seat nightclub.

Jane Bartley is a staff analyst for Westar's corporate parent, charged (among other things) with predicting and analyzing beverages sales (liquor, beer, and wine, primarily) for the chain's business hotels. In fact, her deadline for producing some sort of forecast for Westar beverage sales was the end of the week. After years in the business, Jane had seen a lot of approaches to forecasting beverages sales, but none that struck her as particularly helpful. Most of them used only room occupancy as a basis for forecasting.

Not that it was unreasonable to consider room occupancy: clearly, the number of people staying in the hotel might well influence beverage sales. Further, hotel occupancy was (at least to some extent) predictable, as people made advance reservations, so it could be used for forecasting. In the case of the Westar, though, Jane suspected other things were involved, and the existing corporate forecasting methods (such as they were) made no allowance for them. Specifically Jane wondered if season, promotional food offered during happy hour, and the presence or absence of a piano player in the Pour Nous Lounge might be factors to consider. She was able to gather data for the most recent 30 months on some relevant variables described below.

The promotional food had been discontinued after 12 month and the piano player after month 13 as the previous management attempted to cut costs. Data from month 14 and 15 were unavailable because a change in ownership about them had led to some changes in record-keeping techniques.

Jane suspected that with these data she could develop a better understanding of the factors that really influenced beverages sales at the Westar and perhaps even influence her department to consider some new and better ways to do the forecasting.

See attached excel file for the Dataset,