LearNext: learning to predict tourists movements

In this paper, we tackle the problem of predicting the "next" geographical position of a tourist given her history (i.e., the prediction is done accordingly to the tourist's current trail) by means of supervised learning techniques, namely Gradient Boosted Regression Trees and Rank- ing SVM. The learning is done on the basis of an object space represented by a 68 dimension feature vector, specifically designed for tourism related data. Furthermore, we propose a thorough comparison of several methods that are considered state-of-the-art in touristic recommender and trail prediction systems as well as a strong popularity baseline. Experiments show that the methods we propose outperform important competitors and baselines thus providing strong evidence of the performance of our solutions.