Forecasting Monthly Tourism Demand Using Enhanced Backpropagation Neural Network

The accurate forecasting of monthly tourism demand can improve tourism policies and planning. However, the complex nonlinear characteristics of monthly tourism demand complicate forecasting. This study proposes a novel approach named ICPSO-BPNN that combines improved chaotic particle swarm optimization (ICPSO) with backpropagation neural network (BPNN) to forecast monthly tourism demand. ICPSO with chaotic initialization and two search strategies, sigmoid-like inertia weight, and linear acceleration coefficients is utilized to search for the appropriate initial connection weights and thresholds necessary to improve the performance of BPNN. Two comparative real-life examples and one extended example are adopted to verify the superiority of the proposed ICPSO-BPNN. Results show ICPSO-BPNN outperforms that of the basic BPNN, autoregressive integrated moving average model, support vector regression, and other popular existing models.