Harmonizing Heritage and Artificial Neural Networks: The Role of Sustainable Tourism in UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Abstract

The classification of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites (WHS) is essential for promoting sustainable tourism and ensuring the long-term conservation of cultural and natural heritage sites. Therefore, two commonly used techniques for classification problems, multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) neural networks, were utilized to define the pros and cons of their applications. Then, according to the findings, both correlation attribute evaluator (CAE) and relief attribute evaluator (RAE) identified the region and date of inscription as the most prominent features in the classification of UNESCO WHS. As a result, a trade-off condition arises when classifying a large dataset for sustainable tourism between MLP and RBF regarding evaluation time and accuracy. MLP achieves a slightly higher accuracy rate with higher processing time, while RBF achieves a slightly lower accuracy rate but with much faster evaluation time.