Toward a better fitness club: Evidence from exerciser online rating and review using latent Dirichlet allocation and support vector machine

Fitness clubs have never ceased searching for quality improvement opportunities to better serve their exercisers, whereas exercisers have been posting online ratings and reviews regarding fitness clubs. Studied together, the quantitative rating and qualitative review can provide a comprehensive depiction of exercisers’ perception of fitness clubs. However, the typological and dimensional discrepancies of online rating and review have hindered the joint study of the two data sets to fully exploit their business value. To this end, this study bridges the gap by examined 53,979 pairs of exerciser online rating and review from 100 fitness clubs in Shanghai, China. Using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) based text mining, we identified the 17 major topics on which the exercisers were writing. A support vector machine (SVM) classifier was then employed to establish the rating-review relations, with an accuracy rate of up to 86%. Finally, the relative impact of each topic on exerciser satisfaction was computed and compared by introducing virtual reviews. The significance of this study is that it systematically creates a standardized protocol of mining and correlating the massive structured/quantitative and unstructured/qualitative data available online, which is readily transferable to the other service and product sectors