Where To Go at the Next Timestamp

Abstract

The next Point of Interest (POI) recommendation is the core technology of smart city. Current state-of-the-art models attempt to improve the accuracy of the next POI recommendation by incorporating temporal and spatial intervals or by partitioning the POI coordinates into grids. However, they all overlook a detail that in real life, people always want to know where to go at an exact time point or after a specific time interval instead of aimlessly asking where to go next. Moreover, due to individual preferences, different users may visit different places at the same timestamp. Therefore, utilizing timestamp queries can enhance the personalized recommendation capability of the model and mitigate overfitting risks. These implies that using timestamp can achieve more precise recommendations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use the next timestamp for next POI recommendation. In particular, we propose a Time-Stamp Cross Attention Network (TSCAN). TSCAN is a two-layer cross-attention network. The first layer, Time Stamp Cross Attention Block (TSCAB), uses cross-attention between the next timestamp and historical timestamps, and multiplies the attention scores on corresponding POI to predict the next POI that is most related to the history. The other layer, Cross Time Interval Aware Block (CTIAB), applies the time intervals between the next timestamp and historical timestamps to the POI obtained by TSCAB and historical POIs, allowing temporally adjacent POIs to have a greater similarity. Our model not only has a significant improvement in accuracy but also achieves the goal of personalized recommendation, effectively alleviating overfitting. We evaluate the proposed model with three real-world LBSN datasets, and show that TSCAN outperforms the state-of-the-art next POI recommendation models by 5~9%. TSCAN can not only recommend the next POI, but also recommend the possible POI to visit at any specific timestamp in the future.