Rats are a persistent problem for New York City residents. So much so that the NYC rat has become a cultural symbol of the city. Our goal for this project is to predict the number of 311 rat sightings reports over the next 14 days in New York City.

Question: Can we predict 311 rat sightings reports in NYC and at various spatial levels?

Data: NYC Open Data on 311 Rat Sightings, Weather Data from Open-Meteo

Approach: Engineer weather features that might influence rat populations. Choose models that can handle multiple seasonalities, trend changes, and holiday effects. Compare various models meant for time series forecasting such as SARIMA, Holt-Winters, Prophet, Seasonal Average Models. Consider using XGBoost to improve models by predicting residuals and complex relationships between rat sightings, weather patterns, and temporal features.

Models: Prophet, NeuralProphet, XGBoost.