Forecasting Daily Air Arrivals to Mallorca Island Using Nearest Neighbor Methods

This paper investigates the feasibility of using different generalizations of the nearest neighbor method in a tourism forecasting problem. The method is widely employed in different fields of research but, inexplicably, it is practically unknown in tourism forecasting. Specifically, the method is applied to anticipate the tourism demand to Mallorca Island, approximated by the number of daily arrivals. The predictive analysis is not only centered in knowing the exact value of arrivals (point prediction), but also in anticipating the direction of the sign movement (sign prediction). Furthermore, this study also offers further evidence on a subject scarcely treated in tourism economics: the searching of predictable non-linear dynamics. The results encourage the use of this technique and reveal the existence of a non-linear seasonal effect in the analyzed tourism time series.