Predicting tourism loyalty using an integrated Bayesian network mechanism

For effective Bayesian networks (BN) prediction with prior knowledge, this study proposes an integrated BN mechanism that adopts linear structural relation model (LISREL) to examine the belief or causal relationships which are subsequently used as the BN network structure for predicting tourism loyalty. Four hundred and fifty-two valid samples were collected from tourists with the tour experience of the Toyugi hot spring resort, Taiwan. The proposed mechanism is compared with back-propagation neural networks (BPN) or classification and regression trees (CART) for 10-fold cross-validation. The results indicate that our approach is able to produce effective prediction outcomes. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.