Group pooling for deep tourism demand forecasting

Advances in tourism demand forecasting immensely benefit tourism and other sectors, such as economic and resource management studies. However, even for novel AI-based methodologies, the challenge of limited available data causing model overfitting and high complexity in forecasting models remains a major problem. This study proposes a novel group-pooling-based deep-learning model (GP-DLM) to address these problems and improve model accuracy. Specifically, with our group-pooling method, we advance the tourism forecasting literature with the following findings. First, GP-DLM provides superior accuracy in comparison with benchmark models. Second, we define the novel dynamic time warping (DTW) clustering quantitative approach. Third, we reveal cross-region factors that influence travel demands of the studied regions, including "travel blog," "best food," and "Air Asia."