Forecasting

I've been poking around with Forecasting in Analytics now that we're on 15.2.35. Mystic Aquarium is largely seasonal- we have year-round traffic, but July - Labor Day is by far our busiest time. Is there a way to get Analytics to respect this?

If we're looking at January through July, the projection will naturally be ' this is trending upward'. However, that projection doesn't know 'Mystic's summer is always higher than it's winters' , or 'Mystic's Fall and winter are always less than its summer', so it won't be able to build that into it's modeling. Given that, how can I use the forecasting in a useful manner?

For instance, right now, even when looking at all of our Admission attendance data, it's projecting that mid-September and October will be steady at ~2.5k per day. Last year, we averaged less than half of that for our September/October months. Is there a usable way for us to leverage forecasting if the models can't be told 'summer high, winter low'?

I've been poking around with Forecasting in Analytics now that we're on 15.2.35. Mystic Aquarium is largely seasonal- we have year-round traffic, but July - Labor Day is by far our busiest time. Is there a way to get Analytics to respect this?

If we're looking at January through July, the projection will naturally be ' this is trending upward'. However, that projection doesn't know 'Mystic's summer is always higher than it's winters' , or 'Mystic's Fall and winter are always less than its summer', so it won't be able to build that into it's modeling. Given that, how can I use the forecasting in a useful manner?

For instance, right now, even when looking at all of our Admission attendance data, it's projecting that mid-September and October will be steady at ~2.5k per day. Last year, we averaged less than half of that for our September/October months. Is there a usable way for us to leverage forecasting if the models can't be told 'summer high, winter low'?

We do not even have forecasting yet, but I am extremely interested in the answer to this question as I think it is near the core of how I would want to use it.

It should be able to adapt to this, as long as you are feeding the entire year, or multiple years of data in the input, not just the July-Labor day. Whats the setup of the chart you made? because i think the way your describing, the model is assuming a linear relationship, which is the wrong choice. I know the forecasting has multiple models.

The forecasting concept you are looking for is "seasonality." Brian might be correct in that increasing the window of time over multiple years might help it pick up on the needed seasonality aspect of the forecasting. We haven't upgraded yet to that yet, so I can't speak to how you would get it to show in Analytics.

In the widget I linked, I fed it all of our Attendance data in Tesssitura

When I zoom the widget and look at the Forecasting, it shows this:

The Forecast value has almost no slope (2.45 to 2.47), regardless of the Perf Date.

I was looking at this earlier today, similar chart but I had mine by month.  It was doing the same thing.  I tried changing the settings to the different model options without much change.  I tried feeding it a lower bound equal to our worst month in history, and still nothing.  Mine is very flat but it's a problem in the opposite direction in that I expect us to do better than it is saying in Oct, Nov, Dec as we have done over the last many years.  I also tried cutting out the pandemic months with a filter and that didn't help either.  
I am very interested in using this technology, but need to figure out how to make it work better for us first.