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Purpose: Accurate foreign tourist arrivals forecasting can help public and private sectors to formulate scientific tourism planning and improve the allocation efficiency of tourism resources. This paper aims to address the problem of low prediction accuracy of Chinese inbound tourism demand caused by the lack of valid historical data. Design/methodology/approach: A novel hybrid Chinese inbound tourism demand forecasting model combining fractional non-homogenous discrete grey model and firefly algorithm is constructed. In the proposed model, all adjustable parameters of the fractional non-homogenous discrete grey model are optimized simultaneously by the firefly algorithm. Findings: The data sets of annual foreign tourist arrivals to China are used to verify the validity of the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and can be used as a useful predictor for the prediction of Chinese inbound tourism demand. Originality/value: The method proposed in this paper is effective and can be used as a feasible approach for forecasting the development trend of Chinese inbound tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Radiation symmetry evaluation is critical to the laser driven Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF), which is usually obtained through a view-factor equation model. The model is nonlinear, and its equation number can be very large when the size of discrete mesh element is very small to achieve a prescribed accuracy, which may lead to an intensive equation solving process. In this paper, an efficient radiation symmetry analysis approach is presented through equation model compression, in which, (1) the radiation symmetry analysis is carried out for two kinds of geometric shapes: cylindrical capsule and spherical capsule. For the structure of cylindrical capsule, the Legendre–Fourier basis and Zernike basis are applied to represent the radiation flux of the capsule. And for the structure of spherical capsule, the spherical harmonics is employed to sparsely represent the radiation flux on the capsule and spherical cavity. Then the nonlinear energy equilibrium equations are transformed into the equations with sparse coefficients, which means there are many redundant equations, (2) Only a few equations are uniformly selected to recover such sparse coefficients with a Latin hypercube sampling scheme, (3) A Modified Conjugate Gradient-Iteration Hard Thresholding (MCG-IHT) algorithm is then given to rapidly solve such sparse coefficients equations with as few as possible iterations. Finally, the presented approach is validated with two experiment targets for Shenguang III-YX and Shenguang II laser facilities in China. The equation model is reduced much more, only a few of equations are required to achieve the radiation flux with comparable accuracy within much less of computation time. And the solution is much more efficient as the size of discrete mesh element decreases, in which, almost 1.1% computation time is required to obtain the comparable result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]