Online reviews analysis for customer segmentation through dimensionality reduction and deep learning techniques

Abstract

Digital social media has played a key role in tourism and hospitality industry. The use of machine and deep learning has been effective in market segmentation and customers' preference prediction through social big data analysis. This paper develops a new method to analyze large set of open data in social networking sites for travellers segmentation and predict tourists' choice preferences using dimensionality reduction and deep learning techniques. Deep belief network was used for predicting the travellers’ choice preferences from their past ratings and online reviews. Self-organizing map was also used for clustering the travellers’ online ratings and reviews. The feature extraction is performed using latent Dirichlet allocation as an unsupervised learning technique. To improve the effectiveness of learning, a dimensionality reduction technique, higher-order singular value decomposition, is performed on the clusters for the prediction of missing values and traveller–traveller similarity calculation. The proposed method was evaluated on travellers’ online reviews and ratings which were crawled from TripAdvisor. The results showed the robustness of the proposed method in analysing the large text-based reviews and numerical datasets in tourism context.