A novel hybrid deep learning approach for tourism demand forecasting

This paper proposes a new hybrid deep learning framework that combines search query data, autoencoders (AE) and stacked long-short term memory (staked LSTM) to enhance the accuracy of tourism demand prediction. We use data from Google Trends as an additional variable with the monthly tourist arrivals to Marrakech, Morocco. The AE is applied as a feature extraction procedure to dimension reduction, to extract valuable information and to mine the nonlinear information incorporated in data. The extracted features are fed into stacked LSTM to predict tourist arrivals. Experiments carried out to analyze performance in forecast results of proposed method compared to individual models, and different principal component analysis (PCA) based and AE based hybrid models. The experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms other models.