An evaluation of tourist attraction ranking methods

摘要

An evaluation of ranking methods is important in recommendation systems to verify the design and find out possible improvements. However, evaluating these methods with tourists' opinion is not a trivial task. The main reason is that a tourist is able to rate only tourist attractions where he/she has ever visited; therefore the number of tourist attractions ranked by individuals is different. This paper proposes a process of evaluation that can compare the pairs of ranks that have the different number of tourist attractions. This research work demonstrates ranking the famous tourist attractions in Nakhon Ratchasima province, Thailand using an expert-based method, i.e., analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Moreover, a statistical method, called Spearman correlation coefficient or Spearman's Rho, is applied to evaluate the tourist attraction ranks obtained from the AHP with the ranks rated by each tourist. The Spearman's Rho can compare the pairs of ranks and calculate the duplicated ranks in those compared ranks. The proposed procedure of tourist attraction ranking and evaluation could be applied to rank and evaluate other types of data.