Graphical models for studying museum networks: the Abbonamento Musei Torino Piemonte

TL;DR

This paper utilizes probabilistic graphical models to analyze consumer visitation patterns in the museum network of Abbonamento Musei Torino Piemonte, revealing associations and asymmetries in visitor behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of graphical models to study museum networks based on consumer choice data, highlighting associations and directional relationships.

Findings

Identified strong associations among museums based on visitor data.

Revealed asymmetries in museum visitation patterns.

Mapped the structure of the museum network using graphical models.

Abstract

Probabilistic graphical models are a powerful tool to represent real-word phenomena and to learn network structures starting from data. This paper applies graphical models in a new framework to study association rules driven by consumer choices in a network of museums. The network consists of the museums participating in the program of Abbonamento Musei Torino Piemonte, which is a yearly subscription managed by the Associazione Torino Citt\`a Capitale Europea. Consumers are card-holders, who are allowed to entry to all the museums in the network for one year. We employ graphical models to highlight associations among the museums driven by card-holder visiting behaviour. We use both undirected graphs to investigate the strength of the network and directed graphs to highlight asimmetry in the association rules.