A novel forecasting framework combining virtual samples and enhanced Transformer models for tourism demand forecasting

Abstract

Accurate tourism demand forecasting is hindered by limited historical data and complex spatiotemporal dependencies among tourist origins. A novel forecasting framework integrating virtual sample generation and a novel Transformer predictor addresses constraints arising from restricted data availability. A spatiotemporal GAN produces realistic virtual samples by dynamically modeling spatial correlations through a graph convolutional network, and an enhanced Transformer captures local patterns with causal convolutions and long-term dependencies with self-attention,eliminating autoregressive decoding. A joint training strategy refines virtual sample generation based on predictor feedback to maintain robust performance under data-scarce conditions. Experimental evaluations on real-world daily and monthly tourism demand datasets indicate a reduction in average MASE by 18.37% compared to conventional Transformer-based models, demonstrating improved forecasting accuracy. The integration of adaptive spatiotemporal sample augmentation with a specialized Transformer can effectively address limited-data forecasting scenarios in tourism management.