The censored demand estimation problem has been well studied over the past 20 years. Theseminal paper is Talluri and Van Ryzin 2004, which models demand as the product of an
unobserved arrival rate and purchase probability, and uses Expectation Maximization (EM)
for estimation. In this work, I apply their model to the case of a small hotel with a single
product, and adapt the model to use a time-varying arrival rate. Modeling the arrival rate
as a step function, the choice of where the steps fall is a crucial hyperparameter, so I propose
a heuristic algorithm, the Step Variance Minimization Heuristic (SVMH), to specify the size
and location of the steps in the arrival rate function. On both real and simulated hotel
data, SVMH is superior in terms of both in-sample and out-of-sample mean squared error
when compared to (a) a constant arrival rate and (b) evenly-spaced steps of the same num-
ber. To improve the convergence time of EM, I introduce a variant algorithm, Regularized
Expectation Maximization (REM), that uses 81% fewer iterations than EM, on average. I
show that REM is a Generalized Expectation Maximization (GEM) algorithm, and thus
has similar theoretical properties to EM. I also conducted multiple numerical studies that
show that models estimated using REM perform similarly in-sample and out-of-sample to
their EM counterparts, and produce nearly identical revenue curves. Thus, the convergence
improvements offered by REM do not come at a cost to good parameter estimation.