A Machine Learning Approach -- Building a Hotel Recommendation Engine

All online travel agencies are scrambling to meet the AI driven personalization standard set by Amazon and Netflix. In addition, the world of online travel has become a highly competitive space where brands try to capture our attention (and wallet) with recommending, comparing, matching and sharing. In this post, we aim to create the optimal hotel recommendations for Expedia's users that are searching for a hotel to book. We will model this problem as a multi-class classification problem and build SVM and decision tree in ensemble method to predict which "hotel cluster" the user is likely to book, given his (or her) search details. The data is anonymized and almost all the fields are in numeric format.