Improving hotel room demand forecasting with a hybrid GA-SVR methodology based on skewed data transformation, feature selection and parsimony tuning

Abstract

This paper presents a hybrid methodology, in which a KDDscheme is optimized to build accurate parsimonious models. The methodology tries to find the best model by using genetic algorithms to optimize a KDD scheme formed with the following stages: feature selection, transformation of the skewed input and output data, parameter tuning, and parsimonious model selection. In this work, experiments demonstrated that optimization of these steps significantly improved the model generalization capabilities in some UCI databases. Finally, this methodology was applied to create room demand parsimonious models using booking databases from a hotel located in a region of Northern Spain. Results proved that the proposed method was useful to create models with higher generalization capacity and lower complexity to those obtained with classical KDD processes.