Dynamic Clustering Meets Borda Count to Rank China’s Top Scenic Spots

Choosing a holiday destination sounds like a pleasure, but for the algorithms behind travel platforms it is a formidable computational problem. When thousands of tourists rate a scenic area on dozens of attributes—scenery, cleanliness, service, value, accessibility—the resulting evaluation data become high-dimensional, noisy and internally contradictory. A research team in China has now proposed a way to tame that complexity, combining dynamic clustering with classical ranking theory to produce trustworthy recommendations for the country’s most prestigious tourist attractions. The study, published in Applied Intelligence, was conducted by Wen Li of Hunan First Normal University, Zeyu Xiao and Bin Yu of Hunan Normal University, and Zeshui Xu of Sichuan University, and it demonstrates its approach on China’s 5A scenic spots, the highest rating awarded by the national tourism authorities.

The core difficulty the researchers set out to solve lies in a family of techniques known as Multi-Attribute Decision-Making, or MADM. These methods are designed to rank alternatives—here, scenic spots—against a set of weighted criteria. They work elegantly when the number of attributes is small and the data are homogeneous. But modern tourism evaluation data, harvested at scale from platforms such as Ctrip, violate both assumptions. Hundreds of attributes may be involved, many of them correlated, some redundant, and some outright contradictory in how they rank the same destinations. Feeding such high-dimensional data directly into a decision model can distort results, because redundant or conflicting attributes exert an outsized influence on the final score.

The team’s solution unfolds in three stages. The first stage is a consistency-driven dynamic clustering algorithm. Instead of clustering the scenic spots themselves, the method clusters the evaluation attributes, grouping together those criteria that produce similar ranking patterns across the destinations being compared. In other words, if two attributes—say, visitor ratings of cleanliness and ratings of facility maintenance—consistently order the scenic spots in nearly the same way, they are placed in the same cluster. The word dynamic is important: the algorithm adjusts cluster assignments as it processes the data rather than fixing them in advance, and it uses measures of rank consistency to decide when attributes genuinely belong together. This step reduces the dimensionality of the problem in a principled way, without discarding any information outright.

The second stage applies a well-established decision tool within each cluster: TOPSIS, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution. TOPSIS, introduced in the operations research literature in the 1980s and refined through the 1990s, ranks alternatives by measuring how close each one is to an ideal positive solution and how far it is from a negative ideal solution. Within a single cluster of similar attributes, this is a reasonable and well-conditioned calculation, because the attributes behave coherently. Running TOPSIS separately inside each cluster yields a set of local rankings—one ordered list of scenic spots per cluster—each reflecting the perspective of a coherent family of evaluation criteria.

The third stage is where the method borrows from an unexpected field: voting theory. The researchers use the Borda count, an aggregation procedure devised in the eighteenth century by Jean-Charles de Borda, to fuse the local rankings into a single global ranking. Under the Borda count, each local ranking awards points to each scenic spot according to its position, and the spot with the greatest accumulated total across all clusters wins the top place. This is the same arithmetic that determines winners in some ranked-ballot elections, and its appeal here is the same as in politics: it aggregates many partial, imperfect orderings into one socially robust verdict while dampening the influence of any single anomalous cluster. The authors note that prior theoretical work has argued the Borda count is in an important sense the optimal ranking method, which makes it a natural choice for fusion.

The pipeline was tested on evaluation data for China’s 5A scenic spots, collected from publicly accessible tourism review information on the Ctrip platform. The 5A designation is the pinnacle of China’s tourist rating system, so the destinations involved are already elite; the question was whether a data-driven ranking built from raw, high-dimensional visitor evaluations could reproduce and refine the official assessments. The empirical results showed a high degree of consistency between the method’s output rankings and existing tourism ratings, suggesting that the clustering-and-fusion pipeline captures the same underlying quality signals that expert evaluators respond to, but derives them transparently from visitor data rather than from a fixed administrative rubric.

Why not simply cluster the destinations instead of the attributes? The authors’ design choice reflects the structure of the problem. Tourists evaluate the same scenic spot along many dimensions, and the statistical relationships among those dimensions—how they correlate, which ones move together across destinations—carry the real information. By grouping attributes with similar ranking behaviour, the method effectively discovers latent evaluation perspectives: bundles of criteria that visitors treat as a single experiential quality. Each cluster then functions as a coherent judge, and the Borda count lets these judges vote. This architecture mirrors recent work on large-scale group decision-making, in which clustering and consensus techniques are used to manage hundreds or thousands of participants, and it connects to a growing literature on ranking fusion for massive online review datasets.

The technical payoff is robustness against heterogeneity. Real-world evaluation data are rarely generated by a single consistent process: different visitors weight different concerns, different attributes suffer different amounts of noise, and some criteria may be systematically inflated or deflated on particular platforms. A monolithic MADM model must average all of these effects together, which can wash out genuine distinctions between destinations. The cluster-then-rank-then-fuse design isolates each coherent evaluation channel, ranks destinations within that channel, and only then combines the verdicts. Conflicting attributes are no longer forced into a single weighted sum; they are allowed to speak in their own cluster and then reconciled at the voting stage. The authors position the framework as particularly valuable for scenarios involving high-dimensional and heterogeneous evaluation data, where conventional approaches struggle.

The practical implications extend beyond holiday planning. Tourism management authorities could use such a framework to monitor how the data-driven ranking of attractions evolves as visitor sentiment shifts, identifying destinations whose reputations are improving or deteriorating and tracing those changes back to specific clusters of attributes. Travel platforms could integrate the method into recommendation engines that must reconcile millions of reviews across many criteria. And the underlying algorithmic idea—cluster the criteria, rank within clusters, fuse by voting—is domain-agnostic, potentially transferable to any multi-attribute decision problem drowning in high-dimensional data, from product selection to service quality assessment.

The study also offers a candid account of its data foundations. The datasets were drawn from publicly accessible tourism evaluation information on Ctrip, and the full raw dataset cannot be redistributed because of third-party platform terms of use and intellectual-property restrictions. To support reproducibility, the published paper documents the data source, structure, preprocessing, variable construction, clustering procedure, parameter settings and experimental design in detail, with derived statistical information and non-restricted processed data available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The research was supported by the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China and the Scientific Research Fund of the Hunan Provincial Education Department. As online reviews continue to swell into one of the largest bodies of human judgement ever collected, methods like this one—part statistics, part social choice theory—point toward a future in which the wisdom of crowds is not merely accumulated, but properly counted.

Subject of Research: A dynamic clustering and ranking fusion method for multi-attribute evaluation of 5A scenic spots using tourist review data

Article Title: Dynamic clustering and ranking fusion for tourism recommendations: A data-driven approach to 5A scenic spot evaluation

Article References: Li, W., Xiao, Z., Yu, B., & Xu, Z. (2026). Dynamic clustering and ranking fusion for tourism recommendations: A data-driven approach to 5A scenic spot evaluation. Applied Intelligence, 56(15), Article 433. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-026-07488-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10489-026-07488-4

Keywords: tourism recommendation, dynamic clustering, ranking fusion, TOPSIS, Borda count, multi-attribute decision-making, high-dimensional data, 5A scenic spots, online reviews, Ctrip, consistency-driven clustering, Applied Intelligence