Deep-Learning vs Regression: Prediction of Tourism Flow with Limited Data

Abstract

Modern tourism in the 21st century is facing numerous challenges. One of these challenges is the rapidly growing number of tourists in space limited regions such as historical city centers, museums or geographical bottlenecks like narrow valleys. In this context, a proper and accurate prediction of tourism volume and tourism flow within a certain area is important and critical for visitor management tasks such as visitor flow control and prevention of overcrowding. Static flow control methods like limiting access to hotspots or using conventional low level controllers could not solve the problem yet. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art deep-learning methods in the field of visitor flow prediction with limited data by using available granular data supplied by a tourism region and comparing the results to ARIMA, a classical statistical method. Our results show that deep-learning models yield better predictions compared to the ARIMA method, while both featuring faster inference times and being able to incorporate additional input features.