Short-medium term tourist services demand forecasting with Rough Set Theory

The need to understand more in depth tourism demand trends and the aim to provide the tourist operators and the policy makers with innovative predicting tools are the key points of our research. In tourism literature predicting tourist demand has become a flourishing theme of research at a macroeconomic level, while the study is still lacking at a microeconomic level. Our attention is focused on analyzing Italian tourists' behaviours on the basis of statistical surveys on households, life conditions, incomes, consumptions, travels and holidays. Data analysis is performed by means of Rough Sets Theory, a Data Mining technique which, unlike more traditional time-series and econometric models, can easily manage categorical variables. Data were provided by GfK Eurisko and concern social, cultural and behavioural trends in Italy, collected by means of a psychographic survey. Some interesting relations between consumer behaviours and corresponding tourism consumption choices are obtained in terms of decision rules. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Emerging Markets Queries in Finance and Business local organization