Using association rules to explore interdependencies in vacation portfolios and co-variates: the case of students

The goal of this paper was to explore the vacation histories of a sample of young adults, mostly students, as part of a larger study on vacation planning of this segment of the population. The student segment represents an interesting and highly relevant subject of study. Over a relative short period of time, adolescents and young adults may experience rapid changes in the contextual variables influencing their vacation decisions. To avoid any limiting a priori statistical assumptions in the analysis, the existence of any interdependencies in the vacation portfolios and their covariates are explored in this study using association rules. Revealed data about vacation history in terms of the long holidays of a sample of 211 students was used. The vacation portfolio variables included responses to joint combinations of destination, transport mode, accommodation type, duration of the trip, travel party and season. Association rules was used to find association between (a) the sociociodemographic variables only, (b) the various facets of the vacation portfolio only and (c) the socio-demographic variables and the vacation portfolio choice facets. Results indicate that in addition to expected associations between socio-demographics, dependencies between vacation portfolio choice facets were also detected. Therefore, the application of association rules mining represents a useful technique to find associations in the data.