A Logical Rationale for Sports Tourism to Help Rural Revitalization under Integrated Transfer Learning Strategy

As an emerging driving force to promote rural revitalization, sports tourism provides tourists with rich experiences and effectively promotes the development of local sports industry and economy. In this study, an integrated transfer learning model is constructed to assess the development level of rural revitalization by combining a constrained LightGBM-based learner, a Gaussian distribution and an optimized sampling function. Applying this model, this paper calculates the integrated development index of rural revitalization for 21 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in China between 2019 and 2023. Particularly for Tianjin, the study finds that its comprehensive development index for rural revitalization is relatively low, only 0.244 in 2023. Analyzing the cases of six typical villages in Tianjin, the study finds that sports tourism significantly impacts rural revitalization. During the five years, the average annual growth of tourist arrivals amounted to 125,400 visitors, and the average tourism revenue in 2023 reached 9.686 billion yuan. Meanwhile, these villages had an average of 3.79 points in the development level of living affluence, which is a high level. The study provides empirical support for sports tourism to help rural revitalization. It provides practical references for the future development direction and planning of rural sports tourism, emphasizing the critical role of sports tourism in promoting the comprehensive development of villages.