A Cocktail Approach for Travel Package Recommendation

A COCKTAIL APPROACH FOR TRAVEL PACKAGE RECOMMENDATION

ABSTRACT:

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in recommender systems. Despite significant progress in this field, there still remain numerous avenues to explore. Indeed, this paper provides a study of exploiting online travel information for personalized travel package recommendation. A critical challenge along this line is to address the unique characteristics of travel data, which distinguish travel packages from traditional items for recommendation. To that end, in this paper, we first analyze the characteristics of the existing travel packages and develop a tourist-area-season topic (TAST) model. This TAST model can represent travel packages and tourists by different topic distributions, where the topic extraction is conditioned on both the tourists and the intrinsic features (i.e., locations, travel seasons) of the landscapes. Then, based on this topic model representation, we propose a cocktail approach to generate the lists for personalized travel package recommendation. Furthermore, we extend the TAST model to the tourist-relation-area-season topic (TRAST) model for capturing the latent relationships among the tourists in each travel group. Finally, we evaluate the TAST model, the TRAST model, and the cocktail recommendation approach on the real-world travel package data. Experimental results show that the TAST model can effectively capture the unique characteristics of the travel data and the cocktail approach is, thus, much more effective than traditional recommendation techniques for travel package recommendation. Also, by considering tourist relationships, the TRAST model can be used as an effective assessment for travel group formation.

EXISTING SYSTEM:

 Indeed, there are many technical and domain challenges inherent in designing and implementing an effective recommender system for personalized travel package recommendation. First, travel data are much fewer and sparser than traditional items, such as movies for recommendation, because the costs for a travel are much more expensive than for watching a movie. Second, every travel package consists of many landscapes (places of interest and attractions), and, thus, has intrinsic complex spatio-temporal relationships. For example, a travel package only includes the landscapes which are geographically colocated together. Also, different travel packages are usually developed for different travel seasons. Therefore, the landscapes in a travel package usually have spatial temporal autocorrelations. Third, traditional recommender systems usually rely on user explicit ratings. However, for travel data, the user ratings are usually not conveniently available. Finally, the traditional items for recommendation usually have a long period of stable value, while the value of travel packages can easily depreciate over time and a package usually only lasts for a certain period of time. The travel companies need to actively create new tour packages to replace the old ones based on the interests of the tourists.

DISADVANTAGES OF EXISTING SYSTEM:

·  The problem of leveraging unique features to distinguish personalized travel package recommendations from traditional recommender systems remains pretty open.

·       The user ratings are usually not conveniently available.

PROPOSED SYSTEM:

To address these challenges, in our preliminary work, we proposed a cocktail approach on personalized travel package recommendation. Specifically, we first analyze the key characteristics of the existing travel packages. Along this line, travel time and travel destinations are divided into different seasons and areas. Then, we develop a tourist-area-season topic (TAST) model, which can represent travel packages and tourists by different topic distributions. In the TAST model, the extraction of topics is conditioned on both the tourists and the intrinsic features (i.e., locations, travel seasons) of the landscapes. As a result, the TAST model can well represent the content of the travel packages and the interests of the tourists. Based on this TAST model, a cocktail approach is developed for personalized travel package recommendation by considering some additional factors including the seasonal behaviors of tourists, the prices of travel packages, and the cold start problem of new packages. Finally, the experimental results on real-world travel data show that the TAST model can effectively capture the unique characteristics of travel data and the cocktail recommendation approach performs much better than traditional techniques.

ADVANTAGES OF PROPOSED SYSTEM:

·       It goes beyond personalized package recommendations and is helpful for capturing the latent relationships among the tourists in each travel group.

·       It aims to make personalized travel package recommendations for the tourists.

SYSTEM CONFIGURATION:

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS:

ü Processor                  -        Pentium –IV

ü Speed                        -        1.1 Ghz

ü RAM                         -        512 MB(min)

ü Hard Disk                 -        40 GB

ü Key Board                -        Standard Windows Keyboard

ü Mouse                       -        Two or Three Button Mouse

ü Monitor                     -        LCD/LED

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS:

Operating system      :         Windows XP.

Coding Language      :         .Net

Data Base                 :         SQL Server 2005

Tool                          :         VISUAL STUDIO 2008.

REFERENCE:

Qi Liu, Enhong Chen, Hui Xiong, Yong Ge, Zhongmou Li, and Xiang Wu, “A Cocktail Approach for Travel Package Recommendation”  IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING, VOL. 26, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2014.