Tourism Demand Forecasting Based on a Neuro-Fuzzy Model

Tourism in Greece plays a major role in the country's economy and an accurate forecasting model for tourism demand is a useful tool, which could affect decision making and planning for the future. This paper answers some questions such as: how did the forecasting techniques evolve over the years, how precise can they be, and in what way can they be used in assessing the demand for tourism? An Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) has been used in making the forecasts. The data used as input for the forecasting models relates to monthly time-series tourist arrivals by air, train, sea and road into Greece from January 1996 until September 2011. 80% of the data has been used to train the forecasting models and the rest to evaluate the models. The performance of the model is achieved by the calculation of some well known statistical errors. The accuracy of the ANFIS model is further compared with two conventional forecasting models: the autoregressive (AR) and autoregressive moving average (ARMA) time-series models. The results were satisfactory even if the collected data were not pleasing enough. The ANFIS performed further compared to the other time-series models. In conclusion, the accuracy of the ANFIS model forecast proved its great importance in tourism demand forecasting.