Designing an artificial neural network for forecasting tourism time series

This paper aims to provide, on one hand, an introduction to the theoretical principles of artificial neural networks (ANN) and on the other, a step-by-step methodology for designing a neural network for tourism time series forecasting. The time series corresponding to tourism expenditure in the Balearic Islands (Spain), one of the world's major tourist destinations, has been used as data to illustrate this process. A number of practical rules and discussion points between authors, comprehensible to both academic researchers and practitioners, have been included throughout the paper so that ANN can be applied successfully. Lastly, the results obtained in this study provide information for researchers interested in applying ANN to tourism data forecasting.