Tourist Destination Recommendation System based on Machine Learning

Thailand has a wide variety of tourist attractions, making it difficult for tourist to choose where to go on vacation. The tourist destination recommendation system is a challenge for creating a system to help recommend tourist destinations that are appropriate for personal. Therefore, the principal aims of this research encompass two distinct objectives: firstly, to create a recommendation system for tourist destinations in Thailand by applying machine learning algorithms; and secondly, to analyze factors influencing tourists' choices of destinations. The dataset was gathered from an online survey conducted via Google Forms, comprising responses from 429 tourists in Thailand. In the experiments, three different types of feature selection methods were applied in a data preprocessing step. In the modeling process, four machine learning algorithms, namely Decision Tree, Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN), and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), were used to construct the model and compare the predictive performance of the recommendation system based on hit rate and NDCG. The experimental results showed that suggesting tourist destinations in the Central region was the most effective, with the highest hit rate and NDCG compared to other regions. The average hit rate and NDCG for the five regions were 0.8 and 0.59, respectively. In addition, there has been an analysis of key factors influencing destination selection, such as activity, travel month, travel budget, and the age of tourists, to understand their impact on travel choices in each region of Thailand.