The accuracy of tourist flow prediction is crucial to the sustainable development of tourism industry. However, it is very difficult to forecast the highly nonlinear tourist flow in an accurate manner. The artificial neural network (ANN) has been widely adopted to predict nonlinear time series, but its shallow structure cannot effectively learn the features of high-dimensional tourist flow data. To solve the problem, this paper puts forward a tourist flow prediction model based on deep learning

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... (DL). First, the deep belief network (DBN), with its strong ability to extract nonlinear features, was employed to extract effective features through unsupervised learning of historical tourist flow. Next, the echo state network (ESN) was effectively fused with the DBN. The ESN was placed at the top layer of the tourist flow prediction model, serving as the logic regression layer. Finally, the offline training and prediction effects of the proposed ESN-DBN were verified through experiments on the holiday tourist flow data extracted from a tourist center, and compared with those of two classical prediction models, namely, backpropagation neural network (BPNN) and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA). The results show that the ESN-DBN achieved a mean absolute percentage error was below 12% and a rational computing time; the proposed model also outperformed the two classical models in prediction accuracy. The research results provide an important reference for the forecast of tourist flow and planning of tourism development.