A New Decomposition Ensemble Approach for Tourism Demand Forecasting: Evidence from Major Source Countries

Abstract

The Asian-pacific region is the major international tourism demand market in the world, and its tourism demand is deeply affected by various factors. Previous studies have shown that different market factors influence the tourism market demand at different timescales. Accordingly, the decomposition ensemble learning approach is proposed to analyze the impact of different market factors on market demand, and the potential advantages of the proposed method on forecasting tourism demand in the Asia-pacific region are further explored. This study carefully explores the multi-scale relationship between tourist destinations and the major source countries, by decomposing the corresponding monthly tourist arrivals with noise-assisted multivariate empirical mode decomposition. With the China and Malaysia as case studies, their respective empirical results show that decomposition ensemble approach significantly better than the benchmarks which include statistical model, machine learning and deep learning model, in terms of the level forecasting accuracy and directional forecasting accuracy.