Thailand tourism forecasting based on a hybrid of discrete wavelet decomposition and NARX neural network

Purpose – Accurate forecast of tourist arrivals is crucial for Thailand since the tourism industry is a major economic factor of the country. However, a nonstationarity, normally consisted in nonlinear tourism time series can seriously ruin the forecasting computation. The purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid forecasting method, namely discrete wavelet decomposition (DWD)-NARX, which combines DWD and the nonlinear autoregressive neural network with exogenous input (NARX) to cope with such nonstationarity, as a consequence, improve the effectiveness of the demand-side management activities. Design/methodology/approach – According to DWD-NARX, wavelet decomposition is executed for efficiently extracting the hidden significant, temporal features contained in the nonstationary time series. Then, each extracted feature set at a particular resolution level along with a relative price as an exogenous input factor are fed into NARX for further forecasting. Finally, the forecasting results are reconstructed. Forecasting performance measures rely on mean absolute percentage error, mean absolute error as well as mean square error. Model overfitting avoidance is also considered. Findings – The results indicate the superiority of the DWD-NARX over other efficient related neural forecasters in the cases of high forecasting performance rate as well as competently coping with model overfitting. Research limitations/implications – The scope of this study is confined to Thailand tourist arrivals forecast based on short-term projection. To resolve such limitations, future research should aim to apply the generalization capability of DWD-NARX on other domains of managerial time series forecast under long-term projection environment. However, the exogenous input factor is to be empirically revised on domain-by-domain basis. Originality/value – Few works have been implemented either to handle the nonstationarity, consisted in nonlinear, unpredictable time series, or to achieve great success on finding an appropriate and effective exogenous forecasting input. This study applies DWD to attain efficient feature extraction; then, utilizes the competent forecaster, NARX. This would comprehensively and specifically deal with the nonstationarity difficulties at once. In addition, this study finds the effectiveness of simply using a relative price, generated based on six top-ranked original tourist countries as an exogenous forecasting input.