Check-in Behavior Research Articles

Combining Geographical and Social Influences with Deep Learning for Personalized Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Personalized point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is important to location-based social networks (LBSNs) for helping users to explore new places and for helping third-party services to launch targeted advertisements. Discovering effective features or representations from check-in data is the key to POI recommendation. Deep learning is a representation-learning method with multiple levels for discovering intrinsic features to better represent user preferences. We analyzed users’ check-in behavior in detail and developed a deep learning model to integrate geographical and social influences for POI recommendation tasks. We used a semi-restricted Boltzmann machine to model the geographical similarity and a conditional layer to model the social influence. Experiments with real-world LBSNs showed that our method performed better than other state-of-the-art methods. Theoretically, our study contributes to the effective usage of data science and analytics for social recommender system design. In practice, our results can be used to improve the quality of personalized POI recommendation services for websites and applications.

Modeling location-based social network data with area attraction and neighborhood competition

Modeling user check-in behavior helps us gain useful insights about venues as well as the users visiting them. These insights are important in urban planning and recommender system applications. Since check-in behavior is the result of multiple factors, this paper focuses on studying two venue related factors, namely, area attraction and neighborhood competition. The former refers to the ability of a spatial area covering multiple venues to collectively attract check-ins from users, while the latter represents the extent to which a venue can compete with other venues in the same area for check-ins. We first embark on empirical studies to ascertain the two factors using three datasets gathered from users and venues of three major cities, Singapore, Jakarta and New York City. We then propose the visitation by area attractiveness and neighborhood competition (VAN) model incorporating area attraction and neighborhood competition factors. Our VAN model is also extended to incorporate social homophily so as to further enhance its modeling power. We evaluate VAN model using real world datasets against various state-of-the-art baselines. The results show that VAN model outperforms the baselines in check-in prediction task and its performance is robust under different parameter settings.

A Geographical Factor of Interest Recommended Strategies in Location Based Social Networks

The fast development of area based administrations (LBSNs) has extensively advanced individuals' city lives and pulled in a huge number of recent years. Area based informal organizations (LBSNs) allow clients to registration at a real region and offer step by step rules on purposes of-intrigue (POIs) with their pals each time and anyplace. Such check-in behavior can make daily real-life experiences spread rapidly via the Internet. Moreover, such check-in records in LBSNs can be totally exploited to understand the basic legal guidelines of humans’ every day motion and mobility. This paper centers on evaluating the scientific classification of client displaying for POI proposals through the information investigation of LBSNs. First, we quickly introduce the shape and records traits of LBSNs, then we current a formalization of user modeling for POI suggestions in LBSNs. Contingent upon which sort of LBSNs records used to be completely used in buyer displaying forms for POI proposals, we separate client demonstrating calculations into four classifications: pure check-in data-based consumer modeling, geographical information-based consumer modeling, spatial-temporal information-based consumer modeling, and geo-social information-based consumer modeling. At finally, condensing the current works, we bring up the future difficulties and new guidelines in five possible aspects

STSCR: Exploring spatial-temporal sequential influence and social information for location recommendation

Abstract One remarkable progress in spatial data analysis field lies on location-based social networks (LBSNs), where location recommendation has become an important way to help people locate the interesting places. When providing the location recommendations for users, spatial-temporal sequence of locations on users check-in behaviors have been intensively studied based on the fact that the human movement usually exhibits a pattern of spatial-temporal sequence. However, despite that some works have been proposed to focus on the spatial-temporal correlation among the sequences of users checked-in locations, they still suffer to the following their limitations: (1) these works are unable to handle time intervals between nearby check-in behaviors properly in modeling sequential data. In fact, POIs also have different probabilities of being checked in different time periods; (2) these works fail to employ the social relations adequately to improve final recommendation results especially when the check-in data is sparse; (3) these works are essentially based on the point-wise theory that aims to regress a real-valued score, whereas few work attempt to build a ranking-based estimator for recommendation. To solve the problems mentioned above, a new location recommendation model called Spatial-Temporal aware Social Collaborative Ranking(STSCR) model is proposed to explore the impact of time, spatial-temporal sequential influence and social influence. In particular, the proposed model is built upon a unified tensor factorization framework in which the ne-grained modeling of user-location, user-friend, friend-location, location-time, and location-location interactions. Then, the Bayesian personalized ranking technique is used to optimized the loss function of unified tensor factorization and fit the partial order of locations. As is shown in the experimental results derived from real datasets, our proposed STSCR achieves better recommendation performances than other state-of-the-art location recommendation algorithms.

Time-aware metric embedding with asymmetric projection for successive POI recommendation

Successive Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation aims to recommend next POIs for a given user based on this user’s current location. Indeed, with the rapid growth of Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs), successive POI recommendation has become an important and challenging task, since it can help to meet users’ dynamic interests based on their recent check-in behaviors. While some efforts have been made for this task, most of them do not capture the following properties: 1) The transition between consecutive POIs in user check-in sequences presents asymmetric property, however existing approaches usually assume the forward and backward transition probabilities between a POI pair are symmetric. 2) Users usually prefer different successive POIs at different time, but most existing studies do not consider this dynamic factor. To this end, in this paper, we propose a time-aware metric embedding approach with asymmetric projection (referred to as MEAP-T) for successive POI recommendation, which takes the above two properties into consideration. In addition, we exploit three latent Euclidean spaces to project the POI-POI, POI-user, and POI-time relationships. Finally, the experimental results on two real-world datasets show MEAP-T outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both precision and recall.

Using Location-Based Social Media Data to Observe Check-In Behavior and Gender Difference: Bringing Weibo Data into Play

Population density and distribution of services represents the growth and demographic shift of the cities. For urban planners, population density and check-in behavior in space and time are vital factors for planning and development of sustainable cities. Location-based social network (LBSN) data seems to be a complement to many traditional methods (i.e., survey, census) and is used to study check-in behavior, human mobility, activity analysis, and social issues within a city. This check-in phenomenon of sharing location, activities, and time by users has encouraged this research on gender difference and frequency of using LBSN. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the check-in behavior of Chinese microblog Sina Weibo (referred as “Weibo”) in 10 districts of Shanghai, China, for which we observe the gender difference and their frequency of use over a period. The mentioned districts were spatially analyzed for check-in spots by kernel density estimation (KDE) using ArcGIS. Furthermore, our results reveal that female users have a high rate of social media use, and significant difference is observed in check-in behavior during weekdays and weekends in the studied districts of Shanghai. Increase in check-ins is observed during the night as compared to the morning. From the results, it can be assumed that LBSN data can be helpful to observe gender difference.

Spatial-Temporal Distance Metric Embedding for Time-Specific POI Recommendation

With the growing popularity of location-based social networks (LBSNs), time-specific POI recommendation has become important in recent years, which provides more accurate recommendation services for users in specific spatio–temporal contexts. In this paper, we propose a spatio–temporal distance metric embedding model (ST-DME) for time–specific recommendation, which exploits both temporal and geo-sequential property of a check-in to effectively model users’ time-specific preferences. Specifically, we divide timestamps of user’ check-ins into different time slots and adopt Euclidean distance rather than inner product of latent vectors to measure users’ preferences for POIs in a given time slot. We also apply a transition coefficient based on users’ most recent check-ins to incorporate geo-sequential influence in users’ check-in behaviors. A weighted pairwise loss with a hard sampling strategy is adopted to optimize latent vectors of users, POIs, and time slots in a metric space. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and results show that ST-DME outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for time-specific POI recommendation on two public LBSNs data sets.

User Modeling for Point-of-Interest Recommendations in Location-Based Social Networks: The State of the Art

The rapid growth of location-based services (LBSs) has greatly enriched people’s urban lives and attracted millions of users in recent years. Location-based social networks (LBSNs) allow users to check-in at a physical location and share daily tips on points of interest (POIs) with their friends anytime and anywhere. Such a check-in behavior can make daily real-life experiences spread quickly through the Internet. Moreover, such check-in data in LBSNs can be fully exploited to understand the basic laws of humans’ daily movement and mobility. This paper focuses on reviewing the taxonomy of user modeling for POI recommendations through the data analysis of LBSNs. First, we briefly introduce the structure and data characteristics of LBSNs, and then we present a formalization of user modeling for POI recommendations in LBSNs. Depending on which type of LBSNs data was fully utilized in user modeling approaches for POI recommendations, we divide user modeling algorithms into four categories: pure check-in data-based user modeling, geographical information-based user modeling, spatiotemporal information-based user modeling, and geosocial information-based user modeling. Finally, summarizing the existing works, we point out the future challenges and new directions in five possible aspects.

Multi-modal Bayesian embedding for point-of-interest recommendation on location-based cyber-physical–social networks

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has become a favorite topic on location-based cyber-physical–social networks (LBCPSNs). The geographical influence of locations (e.g., geographical proximity) and the social influence of friends (e.g., social ties) have been widely used in many existing POI recommendation methods, most of which paid little attention to the sequential influence and temporal influence of locations on users’ check-in behaviors. However, human mobility exhibits sequential and temporal patterns. In this paper, we propose a unified probabilistic generative model, i.e., a multi-modal Bayesian embedding model (MMBE), to discover the social, sequential, temporal, and spatial patterns of users’ check-in behaviors simultaneously. Besides, MMBE can model the joint effect of the four factors mentioned above on the decision-making for POI selection across heterogeneous workflow activities in cyber-physical–social(CPS) systems. Then, we conduct an in-depth performance evaluation for MMBE using two large-scale real-world datasets from Gowalla and Brightkite. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the other five state-of-the-art POI recommendation approaches regarding Precision and Recall.

CTF-ARA: An adaptive method for POI recommendation based on check-in and temporal features

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation in location-based social networks (LBSNs) can solve the problem of information overload by providing personalized recommendation service, which is of great value to both users and businesses. However, the existing POI recommendation methods have not considered the effect of diversity features in check-in data, thus leading to unsatisfactory recommendation results. To address this issue, in this paper we propose an adaptive POI recommendation method (called CTF-ARA) by combining check-in and temporal features with user-based collaborative filtering. We first use probability statistical analysis method to mine user activity and similarity features of check-in behavior, variability and consecutiveness features of temporal factor. Then we use K-means algorithm to divide the users into active users and inactive users, and devise a similar user filtering algorithm based on the proposed features. Finally, we utilize cosine similarity of different time slots smoothing technique to make POI recommendation, which can operate adaptively according to the activity of user. The experimental results on Foursquare and Gowalla datasets show that CTF-ARA can improve precision and recall compared to other POI recommendation methods.

A time-aware spatio-textual recommender system

Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) allow users to post ratings and reviews and to notify friends of these posts. Several models have been proposed for Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation that use explicit (i.e. ratings, comments) or implicit (i.e. statistical scores, views, and user influence) information. However the models so far fail to capture sufficiently user preferences as they change spatially and temporally. We argue that time is a crucial factor because user check-in behavior might be periodic and time dependent, e.g. check-in near work in the mornings and check-in close to home in the evenings. In this paper, we present two novel unified models that provide review and POI recommendations and consider simultaneously the spatial, textual and temporal factors. In particular, the first model provides review recommendations by incorporating into the same unified framework the spatial influence of the users’ reviews and the textual influence of the reviews. The second model provides POI recommendations by combining the spatial influence of the users’ check-in history and the social influence of the users’ reviews into another unified framework. Furthermore, for both models we consider the temporal dimension and measure the impact of time on various time intervals. We evaluate the performance of our models against 10 other methods in terms of precision and recall. The results indicate that our models outperform the other methods.

Learning to Recommend Point-of-Interest with the Weighted Bayesian Personalized Ranking Method in LBSNs

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has been well studied in recent years. However, most of the existing methods focus on the recommendation scenarios where users can provide explicit feedback. In most cases, however, the feedback is not explicit, but implicit. For example, we can only get a user’s check-in behaviors from the history of what POIs she/he has visited, but never know how much she/he likes and why she/he does not like them. Recently, some researchers have noticed this problem and began to learn the user preferences from the partial order of POIs. However, these works give equal weight to each POI pair and cannot distinguish the contributions from different POI pairs. Intuitively, for the two POIs in a POI pair, the larger the frequency difference of being visited and the farther the geographical distance between them, the higher the contribution of this POI pair to the ranking function. Based on the above observations, we propose a weighted ranking method for POI recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce a Bayesian personalized ranking criterion designed for implicit feedback to POI recommendation. To fully utilize the partial order of POIs, we then treat the cost function in a weighted way, that is give each POI pair a different weight according to their frequency of being visited and the geographical distance between them. Data analysis and experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the existence of user preference on different POI pairs and the effectiveness of our weighted ranking method.

Partition-based collaborative tensor factorization for POI recommendation

The rapid development of location-based social networks U+0028 LBSNs U+0029 provides people with an opportunity of better understanding their mobility behavior which enables them to decide their next location. For example, it can help travelers to choose where to go next, or recommend salesmen the most potential places to deliver advertisements or sell products. In this paper, a method for recommending points of interest U+0028 POIs U+0029 is proposed based on a collaborative tensor factorization U+0028 CTF U+0029 technique. Firstly, a generalized objective function is constructed for collaboratively factorizing a tensor with several feature matrices. Secondly, a 3-mode tensor is used to model all users U+02BC check-in behaviors, and three feature matrices are extracted to characterize the time distribution, category distribution and POI correlation, respectively. Thirdly, each user’s preference to a POI at a specific time can be estimated by using CTF. In order to further improve the recommendation accuracy, PCTF U+0028 Partition-based CTF U+0029 is proposed to fill the missing entries of a tensor after clustering its every mode. Experiments on a real checkin database show that the proposed method can provide more accurate location recommendation.

Reliable Collaborative Filtering on Spatio-Temporal Privacy Data

Lots of multilayer information, such as the spatio-temporal privacy check-in data, is accumulated in the location-based social network (LBSN). When using the collaborative filtering algorithm for LBSN location recommendation, one of the core issues is how to improve recommendation performance by combining the traditional algorithm with the multilayer information. The existing approaches of collaborative filtering use only the sparse user-item rating matrix. It entails high computational complexity and inaccurate results. A novel collaborative filtering-based location recommendation algorithm called LGP-CF, which takes spatio-temporal privacy information into account, is proposed in this paper. By mining the users check-in behavior pattern, the dataset is segmented semantically to reduce the data size that needs to be computed. Then the clustering algorithm is used to obtain and narrow the set of similar users. User-location bipartite graph is modeled using the filtered similar user set. Then LGP-CF can quickly locate the location and trajectory of users through message propagation and aggregation over the graph. Through calculating users similarity by spatio-temporal privacy data on the graph, we can finally calculate the rating of recommendable locations. Experiments results on the physical clusters indicate that compared with the existing algorithms, the proposed LGP-CF algorithm can make recommendations more accurately.

Indigenization of urban mobility

The identification of urban mobility patterns is very important for predicting and controlling spatial events. In this study, we analyzed millions of geographical check-ins crawled from a leading Chinese location-based social networking service (Jiepang.com), which contains demographic information that facilitates group-specific studies. We determined the distinct mobility patterns of natives and non-natives in all five large cities that we considered. We used a mixed method to assign different algorithms to natives and non-natives, which greatly improved the accuracy of location prediction compared with the basic algorithms. We also propose so-called indigenization coefficients to quantify the extent to which an individual behaves like a native, which depends only on their check-in behavior, rather than requiring demographic information. Surprisingly, the hybrid algorithm weighted using the indigenization coefficients outperformed a mixed algorithm that used additional demographic information, suggesting the advantage of behavioral data in characterizing individual mobility compared with the demographic information. The present location prediction algorithms can find applications in urban planning, traffic forecasting, mobile recommendation, and so on.

Exploiting Viral Marketing for Location Promotion in Location-Based Social Networks

With the explosion of smartphones and social network services, location-based social networks (LBSNs) are increasingly seen as tools for businesses (e.g., restaurants and hotels) to promote their products and services. In this article, we investigate the key techniques that can help businesses promote their locations by advertising wisely through the underlying LBSNs. In order to maximize the benefit of location promotion, we formalize it as an influence maximization problem in an LBSN, i.e., given a target location and an LBSN, a set of k users (called seeds) should be advertised initially such that they can successfully propagate and attract many other users to visit the target location. Existing studies have proposed different ways to calculate the information propagation probability, that is, how likely it is that a user may influence another, in the setting of a static social network. However, it is more challenging to derive the propagation probability in an LBSN since it is heavily affected by the target location and the user mobility, both of which are dynamic and query dependent. This article proposes two user mobility models, namely the Gaussian-based and distance-based mobility models, to capture the check-in behavior of individual LBSN users, based on which location-aware propagation probabilities can be derived. Extensive experiments based on two real LBSN datasets have demonstrated the superior effectiveness of our proposals compared with existing static models of propagation probabilities to truly reflect the information propagation in LBSNs.

Joint Modeling of User Check-in Behaviors for Real-time Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has become an important means to help people discover attractive and interesting places, especially when users travel out of town. However, the extreme sparsity of a user-POI matrix creates a severe challenge. To cope with this challenge, we propose a unified probabilistic generative model, the Topic-Region Model (TRM) , to simultaneously discover the semantic, temporal, and spatial patterns of users’ check-in activities, and to model their joint effect on users’ decision making for selection of POIs to visit. To demonstrate the applicability and flexibility of TRM, we investigate how it supports two recommendation scenarios in a unified way, that is, hometown recommendation and out-of-town recommendation. TRM effectively overcomes data sparsity by the complementarity and mutual enhancement of the diverse information associated with users’ check-in activities (e.g., check-in content, time, and location) in the processes of discovering heterogeneous patterns and producing recommendations. To support real-time POI recommendations, we further extend the TRM model to an online learning model, TRM-Online, to track changing user interests and speed up the model training. In addition, based on the learned model, we propose a clustering-based branch and bound algorithm (CBB) to prune the POI search space and facilitate fast retrieval of the top- k recommendations. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our proposals on two real-world datasets, including recommendation effectiveness, overcoming the cold-start problem, recommendation efficiency, and model-training efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our TRM models, especially TRM-Online, compared with state-of-the-art competitive methods, by making more effective and efficient mobile recommendations. In addition, we study the importance of each type of pattern in the two recommendation scenarios, respectively, and find that exploiting temporal patterns is most important for the hometown recommendation scenario, while the semantic patterns play a dominant role in improving the recommendation effectiveness for out-of-town users.

A Unified Point-of-Interest Recommendation Framework in Location-Based Social Networks

Location-based social networks (LBSNs), such as Gowalla, Facebook, Foursquare, Brightkite, and so on, have attracted millions of users to share their social friendship and their locations via check-ins in the past few years. Plenty of valuable information is accumulated based on the check-in behaviors, which makes it possible to learn users’ moving patterns as well as their preferences. In LBSNs, point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is one of the most significant tasks because it can help targeted users explore their surroundings as well as help third-party developers provide personalized services. Matrix factorization is a promising method for this task because it can capture users’ preferences to locations and is widely adopted in traditional recommender systems such as movie recommendation. However, the sparsity of the check-in data makes it difficult to capture users’ preferences accurately. Geographical influence can help alleviate this problem and have a large impact on the final recommendation result. By studying users’ moving patterns, we find that users tend to check in around several centers and different users have different numbers of centers. Based on this, we propose a Multi-center Gaussian Model (MGM) to capture this pattern via modeling the probability of a user’s check-in on a location. Moreover, users are usually more interested in the top 20 or even top 10 recommended POIs, which makes personalized ranking important in this task. From previous work, directly optimizing for pairwise ranking like Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) achieves better performance in the top- k recommendation than directly using matrix matrix factorization that aims to minimize the point-wise rating error. To consider users’ preferences, geographical influence and personalized ranking, we propose a unified POI recommendation framework, which unifies all of them together. Specifically, we first fuse MGM with matrix factorization methods and further with BPR using two different approaches. We conduct experiments on Gowalla and Foursquare datasets, which are two large-scale real-world LBSN datasets publicly available online. The results on both datasets show that our unified POI recommendation framework can produce better performance.

Trip Recommendation Meets Real-World Constraints

As location-based social network (LBSN) services become increasingly popular, trip recommendation that recommends a sequence of points of interest (POIs) to visit for a user emerges as one of many important applications of LBSNs. Personalized trip recommendation tailors to users’ specific tastes by learning from past check-in behaviors of users and their peers. Finding the optimal trip that maximizes user’s experiences for a given time budget constraint is an NP-hard problem and previous solutions do not consider three practical and important constraints. One constraint is POI availability , where a POI may be only available during a certain time window. Another constraint is uncertain traveling time , where the traveling time between two POIs is uncertain. In addition, the diversity of the POIs included in the trip plays an important role in user’s final adoptions. This work presents efficient solutions to personalized trip recommendation by incorporating these constraints and leveraging them to prune the search space. We evaluated the efficiency and effectiveness of our solutions on real-life LBSN datasets.

TICRec: A Probabilistic Framework to Utilize Temporal Influence Correlations for Time-Aware Location Recommendations

In location-based social networks (LBSNs), time significantly affects users' check-in behaviors, for example, people usually visit different places at different times of weekdays and weekends, e.g., restaurants at noon on weekdays and bars at midnight on weekends. Current studies use the temporal influence to recommend locations through dividing users' check-in locations into time slots based on their check-in time and learning their preferences to locations in each time slot separately. Unfortunately, these studies generally suffer from two major limitations: (1) the loss of time information because of dividing a day into time slots and (2) the lack of temporal influence correlations due to modeling users' preferences to locations for each time slot separately. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic framework called TICRec that utilizes temporal influence correlations (TIC) of both weekdays and weekends for time-aware location recommendations. TICRec not only recommends locations to users, but it also suggests when a user should visit a recommended location. In TICRec, we estimate a time probability density of a user visiting a new location without splitting the continuous time into discrete time slots to avoid the time information loss. To leverage the TIC, TICRec considers both user-based TIC (i.e., different users' check-in behaviors to the same location at different times) and location-based TIC (i.e., the same user's check-in behaviors to different locations at different times). Finally, we conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation for TICRec using two real data sets collected from Foursquare and Gowalla. Experimental results show that TICRec achieves significantly superior location recommendations compared to other state-of-the-art recommendation techniques with temporal influence.