A study on the effect of imbalanced data in tourism recommendation models

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to study the effect of imbalanced data in tourism quality models. It is demonstrated that this imbalance strongly affects the accuracy of tourism prediction models for hotel recommendation. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire was used to survey 83,740 clients from hotels between five and two or less stars using a binary logistic model. The data correspond to a sample of 87 hotels from all around the world (120 countries from America, Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia). Findings The results of the study suggest that the imbalance in the data affects the prediction accuracy of the models used, especially to the prediction provided by unsatisfied clients, tending to consider them as satisfied customers. Practical implications In this sense, special attention should be given to unsatisfied clients or, at least, some safeguards to prevent the effect of the imbalance of data should be included in the models. Social implications In the tourism industry, the strong imbalance between satisfied and unsatisfied customers produces misleading prediction results. This fact could have effects on the quality policy of hoteliers. Originality/value In this work, focusing on tourism data, it is shown that this imbalance strongly affects the prediction accuracy of the models used, especially to the prediction of the recommendation provided by unsatisfied customers, tending to consider them as satisfied customers; a methodological approach based on the balance of the data set used to build the models is proposed to improve the accuracy of the prediction for unsatisfied customers provided by traditional services quality models.