On Understanding Diffusion Dynamics of Patrons at a Theme Park

• Main Authors: DU, Jiali, KUMAR, Akshat, VARAKANTHAM, Pradeep Reddy
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2090; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/3089/viewcontent/p1501.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In this work, we focus on the novel application of learning the diffusion dynamics of visitors among attractions at a large theme park using only aggregate information about waiting times at attractions. Main contributions include formulating optimisation models to compute diffusion dynamics. We also developed algorithm capable of dealing with noise in the data to populate parameters in the optimization model. We validated our approach using cross validation on a real theme park data set. Our approach provides an accuracy of about 80$% for popular attractions, providing solid empirical support for our diffusion models.