A Study of Recommending Locations on Location-Based Social Network by Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

The development of location-based social networking (LBSN) services is growing rapidly these days. Users of LBSN services are more interested in sharing tips and experiences of their visits to various locations. In this paper, we aim at a study of recommending locations to users on LBSNs by collaborative filtering (CF) recommenders based only on users' check-in data. We first design and develop a distributed crawler to collect a large amount of check-in data from Gowalla. Then, we use three ways to utilize the check-in data, namely, the binary utilization, the FIF utilization, and the probability utilization. According to different utilizations, we introduce different CF recommenders, namely, user-based, item-based and probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA), to do the location recommendation. Finally, we conduct a set of experiments to compare the performances of different recommenders using different check-in utilizations. The experimental results show that PLSA recommender with the probability utilization outperforms other combinations of recommenders and utilizations for recommending locations to users on LBSN.