Forecasting key indicators of China's inbound and outbound tourism: optimistic–pessimistic method
Grey Systems: Theory and Application
ISSN: 2043-9377
Article publication date: 21 July 2020
Issue publication date: 10 March 2021
Abstract
Purpose
Tourism industry is a highly complex system surrounded by many uncertainties because of its innumerable connections with other supporting systems. Considering tourism, a grey system, the current study proposes optimistic–pessimistic method (OPM). This technique can aid in improving forecast accuracy of four tourism-related indicators, inbound tourism to China, outbound tourism from China, revenues collected through inbound tourism and expenses incurred on outbound tourism.
Design/methodology/approach
The study integrates OPM into EGM and then using the secondary data collected from the World Bank database, predicts the four tourism-related indicators. The mean absolute percentage error steered the performance of the models.
Findings
One of the main contributions of the study lies in its overall evaluation of one of the major travel and tourism countries of the world in light of four crucial indicators. The study highlights, four tourism-related indicators' recent information, contains more valuable information about the future.
Originality/value
OPM represents a novel application of concept of whitenization of interval grey number in grey forecasting theory.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China entitled “Research on network of reliability growth of complex equipment under the background of collaborative development” (71671091). It is also supported by a joint project of both the NSFC and the Royal Society of the UK entitled “On grey dynamic scheduling model of complex product based on sensing information of Internet of things” (71811530338), a project of the Leverhulme Trust International Network entitled “Grey Systems and Its Applications” (IN-2014–020). At the same time, the authors would like to acknowledge the partial support of the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (NC2019003) and support of a project of Intelligence Introduction Base of the Ministry of Science and Technology (G20190010178).
Citation
Javed, S.A., Ikram, M., Tao, L. and Liu, S. (2021), "Forecasting key indicators of China's inbound and outbound tourism: optimistic–pessimistic method", Grey Systems: Theory and Application, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 265-287. https://doi.org/10.1108/GS-12-2019-0064
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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