Understanding the Evolution in Tourist Behavior Patterns through Context-Aware Spatio-Temporal k-Means

Understanding tourist behavior patterns is crucial for developing effective recommendation and decision support systems. The behaviors are often captured through the trajectories followed by tourists during their journeys or the sequences of visited Points of Interest (PoIs). Identifying common patterns and tracking their evolution over time can enhance the ability to understand, predict, and influence tourist choices, ultimately supporting goals like promoting specific destinations and fostering sustainable visitation patterns. Clustering algorithms like k-Means are commonly used to extract frequent patterns, requiring a tailored distance metric suited to the task. Since tourist trajectories combine spatial, temporal, and semantic features, defining a distance function that accurately captures these multifaceted aspects is essential. This paper examines various methods for encoding trajectory data and explores their effects on the clustering process. Finally, we compare and validate their suitability by using a real-world dataset of visits performed by tourists in Verona (Italy) from 2014 to 2022.