A Digital Signage Audience Classification Model Based on the Huff Model and Backpropagation Neural Network

Digital signage is an important outdoor advertising medium in cities. However, advertising on digital signage often lacks pertinence. Thus, it is important to introduce an accurate digital signage audience classification method to facilitate targeted advertising. In this study, a multi-label classification model based on a backpropagation (BP) neural network and the Huff model, referred to as the Huff-BP model, is proposed to investigate digital signage audience classification. A case study is performed on outdoor digital signage within the 6th Ring Road in Beijing, China, and economic census, population census, average housing price, social media check-in and the centrality of traffic networks as research data. The data are divided into 100 × 100-1,000 × 1,000 m normal grids. Multi-label classification modelling factors for various grid scales are constructed. The BP neural network classification algorithm is improved to solve the multilabel classification problem. In addition, an improved Huff model is used to calculate the digital signage influence values between each grid cell and integrated into the improved BP neural network to classify modelling factors at various scales. Finally, four metrics are used to examine the effectiveness of the proposed model. The results show that the Huff-BP-based multi-label classification model achieves relatively good classification results, and the digital signage audiences are mainly concentrated within the 4th Ring Road and near the 5th Ring Road.