Popularity Prediction on Vacation Rental Websites

In the personal house renting scenario, customers usually make quick assessments based on previous customers' reviews, which makes such reviews essential for the business. If the house is assessed as popular, a Matthew effect will be observed as more people will be willing to book it. Due to the lack of definition and quantity assessment measures, however, it is difficult to make a popularity evaluation and prediction. To solve this problem, the concept of house popularity is well defined in this paper. Specifically, the house popularity is decided by inter-event timeand rating score at the same time. To make a more effective prediction over these two correlated variables, a dual-gated recurrent unit (DGRU) is employed. Furthermore, an encoder-decoder framework with DGRU is proposed to perform popularity prediction. Empirical results show the effectiveness of the proposed DGRU and the encoder-decoder framework in two-correlated sequences prediction and popularity prediction, respectively.