Tourism demand forecasting with multi-source data: a hybrid framework integrating denoising, signal decomposition, and machine learning
摘要
Accurate short-term tourism-demand forecasting supports operational planning and sustainable destination management. Existing hybrid approaches frequently combine signal decomposition with machine-learning models, yet preprocessing steps are often applied asymmetrically, and their individual contributions remain unclear. This study proposes a two-sided operator framework that integrates predictor denoising and target decomposition within a unified denoise–decompose–learn structure. Both operators are implemented under a leakage-free expanding-window protocol, and performance is evaluated in a stage-wise manner so that incremental gains can be identified empirically. The framework is tested using weekly tourist arrivals to Mount Siguniang from 2016 to 2020 (195 observations), together with search-engine, online-review, and weather predictors. Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) combined with Empirical Wavelet Transform (EWT) denoising and XGBoost delivers the strongest overall performance. The VMD–EWT specification achieves an MAE of 2,873.94, an RMSE of 3,511.18, and