Rough set analysis and short-medium term tourist services demand forecasting

Along with a growing interest in tourism research is the effort to establish innovative methodologies that are useful to guide the tourist operators and the policy makers in selecting forecasting techniques. Nevertheless, predicting tourist demand is still lacking at a microeconomic level, while it has become a flourishing theme of research uniquely at a macroeconomic level. The main goal is to analyze Italian tourists' behaviours on the basis of statistical surveys on households, life conditions, incomes, consumptions, travels, and vacation. This research is set in the framework of Rough Sets Theory, a Data Mining technique that can easily manage categorical variables. Hence, it is suitable for the exploitation of databases collecting sample surveys data. A large selection of variables from database Sinottica, containing information on social, cultural, and behavioural trends in Italy collected by means of a psychographic survey is provided by a leading market research organization, GfK Eurisko. By defining some decision rules, some interesting relations between consumer behaviours and their corresponding tourism choices are obtained.