Using Machine Learning to Predict Visitors to Totally Protected Areas in Sarawak, Malaysia

Abstract

The machine learning approach has been widely used in many areas of studies, including the tourism sector. It can offer powerful estimation for prediction. With a growing number of tourism activities, there is a need to predict tourists’ classification for monitoring, decision making, and planning formulation. This paper aims to predict visitors to totally protected areas in Sarawak using machine learning techniques. The prediction model developed would be able to identify significant factors affecting local and foreign visitors to these areas. Several machine learning techniques such as k-NN, Naive Bayes, and Decision Tree were used to predict whether local and foreign visitors’ arrival was high, medium, or low to these totally protected areas in Sarawak, Malaysia. The data of local and foreign visitors’ arrival to eighteen totally protected areas covering national parks, nature reserves, and wildlife centers in Sarawak, Malaysia, from 2015 to 2019 were used in this study. Variables such as the age of the park, distance from the nearest city, types of the park, recreation services availability, natural characteristics availability, and types of connectivity were used in the model. Based on the accuracy measure, precision, and recall, results show Decision Tree (Gain Ratio) exhibited the best prediction performance for both local visitors (accuracy = 80.65) and foreign visitors (accuracy = 84.35%). Distance to the nearest city and size of the park were found to be the most important predictors in predicting the local tourist visitors’ park classification, while for foreign visitors, age, type of park, and the natural characteristics availability were the significant predictors in predicting the foreign tourist visitors’ parks classification. This study exemplifies that machine learning has respectable potential for the prediction of visitors’ data. Future research should consider bagging and boosting algorithms to develop a visitors’ prediction model.