MARAN: Supporting awareness of users’ routines and preferences for next POI recommendation based on spatial aggregation

Abstract

Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has emerged as an essential task in recommender systems with the rapid development of location-based social networks (LBSNs). It has a wide range of applications in smart cities for building personalized scenarios. Current research typically uses sequential relationships to mine user preferences; however, it fails to sufficiently explore the spatial dependence of check-ins and the multi-perspective information they contain. To this end, this study proposes a Multiple Active Region Aware Network (MARAN), a novel routine-aware model for the next POI recommendation that simultaneously captures the user’s routine regularity and short-term preference changes from check-in records. The key to MARAN is its ability to decompose sophisticated user behavior into two parts. One is a stable routine part characterized by central-based graphs built from historical trajectories based on spatial aggregation. The other is an unstable preference part that obtains the user’s recent changes from short-term trajectories. Moreover, a neighborhood-aware negative sampler based on adjacent areas was designed to alleviate spatial sparsity, that is, the imbalance between positive and negative samples during model training. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrated that MARAN outperformed state-of-the-art methods.