STS: Spatial–Temporal–Semantic Personalized Location Recommendation

Abstract

The rapidly growing location-based social network (LBSN) has become a promising platform for studying users’ mobility patterns. Many online applications can be built based on such studies, among which, recommending locations is of particular interest. Previous studies have shown the importance of spatial and temporal influences on location recommendation; however, most existing approaches build a universal spatial–temporal model for all users despite the fact that users always demonstrate heterogeneous check-in behavior patterns. In order to realize truly personalized location recommendations, we propose a Gaussian process based model for each user to systematically and non-linearly combine temporal and spatial information to predict the user’s displacement from their currently checked-in location to the next one. The locations whose distances to the user’s current checked-in location are the closest to the predicted displacement are recommended. We also propose an enhancement to take into account category information of locations for semantic-aware recommendation. A unified recommendation framework called spatial–temporal–semantic (STS) is introduced to combine displacement prediction and the semantic-aware enhancement to provide final top-N recommendation. Extensive experiments over real datasets show that the proposed STS framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art location recommendation models in terms of precision and mean reciprocal rank (MRR).