Zone-Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Representation Learning for Urban POI Recommendation

The rising prosperity of Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) witnessed an explosion in the availability of geo-tagged social media data, which enables tremendous location-aware online services, especially next point of interest (POI) recommendation. However, previous next POI recommendation studies usually adopt fix-length time windows for user check-in sequence modeling, leading to a limited capacity in capturing fine-grained user temporal preferences that easily change over time. Besides, existing methods often directly leverage multi-modal contexts as auxiliary to alleviate the data sparsity issue, which fails to fully exploit the sequential patterns of contextual information for inferring user interest drift. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel framework named iTourSPOT which extends traditional collaborative filtering methods with a context-aware POI embedding architecture. For enhancing temporal interests modeling capacity, we associate the context feature extraction with varying-length sessions and incorporate check-in frequencies of POIs as prior knowledge to instruct the session representation learning of our model. Moreover, a collaborative sequence transduction model is designed for joint context sequence modeling and session-based POI recommendation. Experimental results on a real-world geo-tagged photo dataset clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework when compared with state-of-the-art baseline methods, especially in both sparse and cold-start scenarios.

With the rapid development of mobile devices, global positioning system and Web2.0 technology, more and more users are choosing to share rich information in location-based social networks. Point of interest (POI) recommendation is a hot research direction in recent years, this paper first based on the existed recommending research results on the POI, using methods of linear weighting and cascading combination to integrate social factors, geographical factors and time factors to recommend POI, for the sake of improving effectiveness of results. Then, in the Spark cluster environment, it was extended to improve the efficiency and scalability of POI recommendation. Experimental results showed that the implementation of comprehensive POI recommendation methods in Spark cluster environment was more efficient, as the amount of data increased, efficiency advantage was increasingly obvious.

New developments in mobile computing, wireless networking and social networking leverage opportunities to create location-based social networks (LBSNs) such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Place. Pointof-interest (POI) recommendation is a significant task in LBSNs, since it provides recommendations that respect personal preferences and capture social and environmental parameters. Moreover, employing Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in POIs enables to improve recommendation accuracy. Most of existing POI recommendation methods deals with the only single domain, whereas the use of information available from other application domains potentially provides better POI recommendation results. This is particularly relevant for the newly launched LBSNs, where little check in information is available. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a cross domain POI recommendation method in LBSNs and apply transfer learning for this purpose. To this end, we first incorporate both user and POI knowledge in auxiliary domains by discovering the principle coordinates. Next, we transfer them to the target domain and then make predictions using the transferred knowledge. The experimental results demonstrate high performance of our method and the merits of cross-domain POI recommendation in LBSNs.

NRDL: Decentralized user preference learning for privacy-preserving next POI recommendation

Point of Interest (POI) recommendation is to use the user check-in data in location-based Social Networks (LBSN) to predict the next Location that the user will visit. With the rapid development of LBSN, users' check-in information (rating information, geographic location, check-in sequence, social network, etc.) has become more and more accessible. How to effectively fuse and model these multi-source heterogeneous data is crucial to personalized POI recommendations. This paper presents a POI recommendation model based on improved factorization machine and Bert. By integrating social influence on the basis of factorization machine, Bert was used to extract the check-in sequence features. Experiments on real data sets show that our model performs better than the traditional POI recommended model.

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendations in location-based social networks (LBSNs) allow online users to discover various POIs for social activities occurring in the near future close to their current locations. Research has verified that people’s preferences regarding POIs are significantly affected by various internal and external contextual factors, which are therefore worth extensive study for POI recommendation. However, although psychological effects have also been demonstrated to be significantly correlated with an individual’s preferences, such effects have been largely ignored in previous studies on POI recommendation. For this paper, inspired by the famous memory theory in psychology, we were interested in whether memory-based preferences could be derived from users’ check-in data. Furthermore, we investigated how to incorporate these memory-based preferences into an effective POI recommendation scheme. Consequently, we refer to Ebbinghaus’s theory on memory, which describes the attenuation of an individual’s memory in the form of a forgetting curve over time. We first created a memory-based POI preference attenuation model and then adopted it to evaluate individuals’ check-ins. Next, we employed the memory-based values of check-ins to calculate the POI preference similarity between users in an LBSN. Finally, based on this memory-based preference similarity, we developed a novel POI recommendation method. We experimentally evaluated the proposed method on a real LBSN data set crawled from Foursquare. The results demonstrate that our method, which incorporates the proposed memory-based preference similarity for POI recommendation, significantly outperforms other methods. In addition, we found the best value of the parameter H in the memory-based preference model that optimizes the recommendation performance. This value of H implies that an individual’s memory usually has an effect on their daily travel choices for approximately 300 days.

Point of interest (POI) recommendation has become an important means to help people discover attractive locations. Previous studies show that modeling the context information of users' check-ins is necessary for POI recommendation. However, most previous hybrid models ignore the fact that a user's interested region is likely to drive him to visit other POIs in it, which means that his region-level interest is indispensable in the recommendation process. In this paper, we take this challenge and propose a hybrid model called POI-Region POI Recommendation (PRPOIR). Specifically, PRPOIR contains two modules: Interest Module and Context Module. In Interest Module, inspired by the success of the Logistic Matrix Factorization (LMF) to model implicit feedback, we apply it to model users' POI-level interest and region-level interest respectively. To capture the difference in the users' emphasis on region-level interests, we innovatively introduce a strategy to establish the dynamic weight of users' region-level interest. Then in Context Module, by further integrating geographical influence and social correlations into PRPOIR, it can alleviate the sparsity of check-ins and bring further performance improvement. To verify the effectiveness of PRPOIR, we conduct experiments on two real-world datasets, experimental results show that PRPOIR outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

The task of point of interest (POI) recommendation aims to recommend unvisited places to users based on their check-in history. A major challenge in POI recommendation is data sparsity, because a user typically visits only a very small number of POIs among all available POIs. In this paper, we propose AUC-MF to address the POI recommendation problem by maximizing Area Under the ROC curve (AUC). AUC has been widely used for measuring classification performance with imbalanced data distributions. To optimize AUC, we transform the recommendation task to a classification problem, where the visited locations are positive examples and the unvisited are negative ones. We define a new lambda for AUC to utilize the LambdaMF model, which combines the lambda-based method and matrix factorization model in collaborative filtering. Many studies have shown that geographic information plays an important role in POI recommendation. In this study, we focus on two levels geographic information: local similarity and global similarity. We further show that AUC-MF can be easily extended to incorporate geographical contextual information for POI recommendation. Specifically, we propose two novel methods to incorporate geographical information in AUC-MF. Different from most existing models where the contextual information are incorporated into the objective function, the incorporation of contextual information in AUC-MF is a refinement of the model and a sampling strategy. The sampling strategy could speedup convergence and the refining of recommendations is independent of training of the model. This mechanism also enables AUC-MF to be able produce recommendations refined towards different contextual information, with minimum computational cost. Experiments on two datasets show that the proposed AUC-MF outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly in terms of recommendation accuracy.

Leveraging graph neural networks for point-of-interest recommendations

With the development of location-based social networks (LBSNs), users can check in Point-of-Interest (POIs) at any time. However, users do not check in all places they have visited, so the POI trajectory sequence generated through LBSNs is incomplete. An incomplete POI trajectory will have a negative impact on subsequent tasks such as POI recommendation and next POI prediction. Therefore, we complete the missing POI in the user trajectory sequence. Since the POI trajectory sequence is incomplete, it is a challenge to use the pre-order and post-order trajectory sequences with missing POIs. Therefore, we propose a masked POI trajectory model (MPTM) that uses the bidirectionality of BERT to complete the missing POIs in user’s behavior sequence. By masking the missing POIs, MPTM fully explores the relationship between the missing POIs and the known POIs to predict the missing POIs. In order to strengthen the relationship between POIs in the user trajectory sequence, we build a graph for each user’s incomplete POIs sequence to explore the user’s hidden behavior habits. Besides, we design experiments to explore the relationship between the continuity of the number of missing POIs and the predictive ability of the model. The experimental results demonstrate that our MPTM outperforms the state-of-the-art models for completion on missing POIs of user’s behavior sequence.

Heterogeneous graph-based joint representation learning for users and POIs in location-based social network

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation, which helps mobile users explore new places, has become an important location-based service. Existing approaches for POI recommendation have been mainly focused on exploiting the information about user preferences, social influence, and geographical influence. However, these approaches cannot handle the scenario where users are expecting to have POI recommendation for a specific time period. To this end, in this paper, we propose a unified recommender system, named the 'Where and When to gO' (WWO) recommender system, to integrate the user interests and their evolving sequential preferences with temporal interval assessment. As a result, the WWO system can make recommendations dynamically for a specific time period and the traditional POI recommender system can be treated as the special case of the WWO system by setting this time period long enough. Specifically, to quantify users' sequential preferences, we consider the distributions of the temporal intervals between dependent POIs in the historical check-in sequences. Then, to estimate the distributions with only sparse observations, we develop the low-rank graph construction model, which identifies a set of bi-weighted graph bases so as to learn the static user preferences and the dynamic sequential preferences in a coherent way. Finally, we evaluate the proposed approach using real-world data sets from several location-based social networks (LBSNs). The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for POI recommendation in terms of various metrics, such as F-measure and NDCG, with a significant margin.

Real-time event embedding for POI recommendation

Recommending a limited number of Point-of-Interests (POIs) a user will visit next has become increasingly important to both users and POI holders for Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs). However, POI recommendation is a challenging task since complex sequential patterns and rich contexts are contained in extremely sparse user check-in data. Recent studies show that embedding techniques effectively incorporate POI contextual information to alleviate the data sparsity issue, and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) has been successfully employed for sequential prediction. Nevertheless, existing POI recommendation approaches are still limited in capturing user personalized preference due to separate embedding learning or network modeling. To this end, we propose a novel unified spatio-temporal neural network framework, named PPR, which leverages users’ check-in records and social ties to recommend personalized POIs for querying users by joint embedding and sequential modeling. Specifically, PPR first learns user and POI representations by joint modeling User-POI relation, sequential patterns, geographical influence, and social ties in a heterogeneous graph and then models user personalized sequential patterns using the designed spatio-temporal neural network based on LSTM model for the personalized POI recommendation. Furthermore, we extend PPR to an end-to-end recommendation model by jointly learning node representations and modeling user personalized sequential preference. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for successive POI recommendation in terms of Accuracy, Precision, Recall and NDCG. The source code is available at: https://www.anonymous.4open.science/r/DSE-1BEC.

With the popularity of location-based social networks such as Weibo and Twitter, there are many records of points of interest (POIs) showing when and where people have visited certain locations. From these records, next POI recommendation suggests the next POI that a target user might want to visit based on their check-in history and current spatio-temporal context. Current next POI recommendation methods mainly apply different deep learning models to capture user preferences by learning the nonlinear relations between POIs and user preference and pay little attention to mining or using the information that explicitly reflects user preference. In contrast, this paper proposes to utilize data that explicitly reflect user preference and include these data in a deep learning-based process to better capture user preference. Based on the self-attention network, this paper utilizes the attributes of the month of the check-ins and the categories of check-ins during this time, which indicate the periodicity of the user’s work and life and can reflect the habits of users. Moreover, considering that distance has a significant impact on a user’s decision of whether to visit a POI, we used a filter to remove candidate POIs that were more than a certain distance away when recommending the next POIs. We use check-in data from New York City (NYC) and Tokyo (TKY) as datasets, and experiments show that these improvements improve the recommended performance of the next POI. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method improved the recall rate by 7.32% on average.