Learning recency based comparative choice towards point-of-interest recommendation

Abstract

With the prevalence of GPS-enabled smart phones, Location Based Social Network (LBSN) has emerged and become a hot research topic during the past few years. As one of the most important components in LBSN, Points-of-Interests (POIs) has been extensively studied by both academia and industry, yielding POI recommendations to enhance user experience in exploring the city. In conventional methods, rating vectors for both users and POIs are utilized for similarity calculation, which might yield inaccuracy due to the differences of user biases. In our opinion, the rating values themselves do not give exact preferences of users, however the numeric order of ratings given by a user within a certain period provides a hint of preference order of POIs by such user. Firstly, we propose an approach to model users preference by employing utility theory. Secondly, We devise a collection-wise learning method over partial orders through an effective stochastic gradient descent algorithm. We test our model on two real world datasets, i.e., Yelp and TripAdvisor, by comparing with some state-of-the-art approaches including PMF and several user preference modeling methods. In terms of MAP and Recall, we averagely achieve 15% improvement with regard to the baseline methods. The results show the significance of comparative choice in a certain time window and show its superiority to the existing methods.