Recommendation System on Travel Destination based on Geotagged Data

Abstract

Tourism research has benefitted from the worldwide spread and development of social networking services. People nowadays are more likely to rely on internet resources to plan their vacations. Thus, travel recommendation systems are designed to sift through the mammoth amount of data and identify the ideal travel destinations for the users. Moreover, it is shown that the increasing availability and popularity of geotagged data significantly impacts the destination decision. However, most current research concentrates on reviews and textual information to develop the recommendation model. Therefore, the proposed travel recommendation model examines the collective behaviour and connections between users based on geotagged data to provide personalized suggestions for individuals. The model was developed using the user-based collaborative filtering technique. The matrix factorization model was selected as the collaborative filtering technique to compute user similarities due to its adaptability in dealing with sparse rating matrices. The recommendation model generates prediction values to recommend the most appropriate locations. Finally, the model performance of the proposed model was assessed against the popularity and random models using the test design established using Mean Average Precision (MAP), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). The findings indicated that the proposed matrix factorization model has an average MAP of 0.83, with RMSE and MAE values being 1.36 and 1.24, respectively. The proposed model got significantly higher MAP values and the lowest RMSE and MAE values compared to the two baseline models. The comparison shows that the proposed model is effective in providing personalized suggestions to users based on their past visits.