Adaptive tourism forecasting using hybrid artificial intelligence model: a case study of Xi’an international tourist arrivals

Accurate forecasting of tourist demand is important to both business practitioners and government policymakers. In the past decade of rapid development of deep learning, many artificial intelligence methods or deep learning models have been built to improve prediction accuracy. But data-driven end-to-end deep network models usually require large data sets to support. For tourism forecasting, the sample is insufficient and many models are difficult to apply. In this article, we propose a novel hybrid model GM-LSTM, which combines the advantages of gray models and neural networks to achieve self-adaptive prediction with small samples. Specifically, the overall trend of tourism demand is captured by a first-order gray model and the non-linear residual fluctuation is characterized using a long short-term memory (LSTM) network with a rolling mechanism. The model is validated through a case study of up to 38 years of data on annual international tourist arrivals in Xi’an, China. The proposed GM-LSTM model achieved a predicted MAPE value of 11.88%, outperforming other time series models. The results indicate that our proposed hybrid model is accurate and efficient.