Predicting Urban Tourism Flow with Tourism Digital Footprints Based on Deep Learning

Abstract

Tourism flow is not only the manifestation of tourists' special displacement change, but also an important driving mode of regional connection. It has been considered as one of significantly topics in many applications. The existing research on tourism flow prediction based on tourist number or statistical model is not in-depth enough or ignores the nonlinearity and complexity of tourism flow. In this paper, taking Nanjing as an example, we propose a prediction method of urban tourism flow based on deep learning methods using travel diaries of domestic tourists. Our proposed method can extract the spatio-temporal dependence relationship of tourism flow and further forecast the tourism flow to attractions for every day of the year or for every time period of the day. Experimental results show that our proposed method is slightly better than other benchmark models in terms of prediction accuracy, especially in predicting seasonal trends. The proposed method has practical significance in preventing tourists unnecessary crowding and saving a lot of queuing time.