Place with Intention: An Empirical Attendance Predictive Study of Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan
This addresses attendance forecasting for event organizers to manage transportation and crowd flows, but is incremental as it adapts existing Transformer methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of forecasting daily attendance at large-scale international events like Expo 2025 Osaka by proposing a Transformer-based framework that uses reservation dynamics (ticket bookings and updates) as a proxy for visitor intentions, avoiding reliance on multi-source external data. Results show that separately modeling East and West gates improves accuracy, particularly for short- and medium-term horizons.
Accurate forecasting of daily attendance is vital for managing transportation, crowd flows, and services at large-scale international events such as Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan. However, existing approaches often rely on multi-source external data (such as weather, traffic, and social media) to improve accuracy, which can lead to unreliable results when historical data are insufficient. To address these challenges, we propose a Transformer-based framework that leverages reservation dynamics, i.e., ticket bookings and subsequent updates within a time window, as a proxy for visitors' attendance intentions, under the assumption that such intentions are eventually reflected in reservation patterns. This design avoids the complexity of multi-source integration while still capturing external influences like weather and promotions implicitly embedded in reservation dynamics. We construct a dataset combining entrance records and reservation dynamics and evaluate the model under both single-channel (total attendance) and two-channel (separated by East and West gates) settings. Results show that separately modeling East and West gates consistently improves accuracy, particularly for short- and medium-term horizons. Ablation studies further confirm the importance of the encoder-decoder structure, inverse-style embedding, and adaptive fusion module. Overall, our findings indicate that reservation dynamics offer a practical and informative foundation for attendance forecasting in large-scale international events.