Tourist number prediction of historic buildings by singular spectrum analysis

A wooden historic building located in Tibet, China, experienced structural damage when subjected to tourists visit. This kind of ancient building attends to too many visitors every day because heritage sites never fail to attract tourists. There should be a balance between accepting the visitors and the protection of historic buildings considering the importance of the cultural relics. In this paper, the singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is used for forecasting the number of tourist for the building management to exercise maintenance measures to the structure. The analyzed results can be used to control the tourist flow to avoid excessive pedestrian loading on the structure. The relationship between the measured acceleration from the structure and the tourist number is firstly studied. The root-mean-square (RMS) value of the measured acceleration in the passage route of the tourist is selected for forecasting future tourist number. The forecasting results from different methods are compared. The SSA is found slightly outperforms the autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA), the X-11-ARIMA model and the cubic spline extrapolation in terms of the RMS error, mean absolute error and mean absolute percentage error for long-term prediction, whereas the opposite is observed for short-term forecasting.