From Flows to Graphs: Data-Driven Insights on Latent Overtourism with Frequent Pattern Mining
Résumé
Overtourism presents complex and often hidden challenges for urban environments, impacting residents, infrastructure, and visitor satisfaction. This study proposes a novel, data-driven methodology to detect and analyze latent overtourism—the early, subtle warning signs of excessive tourism—before visible breakdowns occur. By leveraging user-generated content from Tripadvisor, a temporal circulation multidigraph is modeled to capture tourist mobility. Using frequent subgraph mining algorithms, the approach identifies recurring tourist movement patterns across different urban scales. These patterns are then analyzed in both spatial and temporal dimensions to detect hotspots and evaluate dynamic attractiveness through a Huff-based probabilistic model. The approach is applied to three cities of varying sizes revealing consistent tourist flows and areas under increasing pressure, suggesting early overtourism.