Short-Term Holiday Travel Demand Prediction for Urban Tour Transportation: A Combined Model Based on STC-LSTM Deep Learning Approach

Short-term prediction of holiday travel demand is a complex but key issue to the planning and management of tour transportation system in big cities. This paper develops an improved spatial and temporal correlation long short-term memory model (STC-LSTM) to forecast short-term holiday travel demand based on deep learning approach. Analysis results show six kinds of tourist flow correlations appears in different sets of tourist attractions, and 27.94 percent of the tourist attractions have mid- or high- positive tourist flow correlation with others, meaning that a positive synchronization mechanism exists between suburban tourist attractions in Beijing. The proposed model predicts the holiday travel demand on the basis of the historical data of the spatial and temporal related tourist flows, and the auxiliary data including meteorological data, temporal data, and Internet search index. Based on actual case study with tourist flow data of the suburban tourist attraction in Beijing, the proposed STC-LSTM is carried out to compared with other conventional prediction approaches. Results show that the proposed approach can improve the prediction accuracy and well capture the different spatial and temporal correlations of tourist flows.