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Using 'Big Data' To Explain Visits To Lakes In 17 Us States, Erik Nelson, Maggie Rogers, Spencer Wood, Jesse Chung, Bonnie Keeler

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We use large dataset on US lakes from 17 states to estimate the relationship between summertime visits to lakes as proxied by social media use and the lakes' water quality, amenities, and surrounding landscape features and socioeconomic conditions. Prior to estimating these relationships we worked on 1) selecting a parsimonious set of explanatory variables from a roster of more than 100 lake attributes and 2) accounting for the non-random pattern of missing water quality data. These steps 1) improved the interpretability of the estimated visit models and 2) widened our estimated models' scope of statistical inference. We used Machine Learning …