Negative Binomial Regression Model for Predicting the Number of Tourists in National Parks of Thailand

This article examines the use of count data models to predict the number of tourists visiting Thailand’s national parks. The dataset, encompassing observations from 2016 to 2022 across 146 national parks, exhibits characteristics such as discreteness, over dispersion, and non-negative integer values. Two models— Poisson (POI), and Negative Binomial (NB)—were compared to identify the most effective approach for modeling and prediction. Model evaluation metrics, including the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and log-likelihood, were employed. Results demonstrate that the Negative Binomial regression model best captures the data’s overdispersion compared to the POI model. The NB model achieved the lowest AIC and highest log-likelihood, affirming its superior performance for this application. Our findings underscore the NB model’s utility in predicting tourism-related count data and suggest its broader applicability to other domains characterized by overdispersed count data.