Constructing and applying an improved fuzzy time series model: Taking the tourism industry for example

This study develops an improved fuzzy time series models for forecasting short-term series data. The forecasts were obtained by comparing the proposed improved fuzzy time series, Hwang’s fuzzy time series, and heuristic fuzzy time series. The tourism from Taiwan to the United States was used to build the sample sets which were officially published annual data for the period of 1991–2001. The root mean square error and mean absolute percentage error are two criteria to evaluate the forecasting performance. Empirical results show that the proposed fuzzy time series and Hwang’s fuzzy time series are suitable for short-term predictions. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.