Analysis of Influencing Factors and Distribution Simulation of Budget Hotel Room Pricing Based on Big Data and Machine Learning from a Spatial Perspective

The goal of investors in the hotel business is to maximize profits, and the price is an important means of achieving this goal. This has attracted many scholars to study the spatiotemporal relationship between hotel room prices and their possible influencing factors from different perspectives. However, most existing studies adopt the linear assumption of the hedonic model, with limited features and a lack of feature selection procedures. Additionally, there are few forecasts of hotel pricing from a spatial perspective. To overcome these gaps, this study adopts linear and nonlinear machine learning methods based on the “big data” of Sanya City to explore the influencing factors of budget hotel pricing. Based on the spatial perspective, 81 potential factors were considered. They are further selected using a feature extraction model called recursive feature elimination. Six machine-learning algorithms were evaluated and compared: random forest, extreme gradient boosting, multi-linear regression, support vector regression, multilayer perceptron regression, and K-nearest neighbor regression. The optimal value was used to further calculate the feature importance. They disclosed 40 important impact characteristics and predicted the spatial distribution of hotel pricing.