Location-based Recommender Systems Research Articles

A Hybrid POI Recommendation System Combining Link Analysis and Collaborative Filtering Based on Various Visiting Behaviors

Location-based recommender systems (LBRSs) have exhibited significant potential in providing personalized recommendations based on the user’s geographic location and contextual factors such as time, personal preference, and location categories. However, several challenges (such as data sparsity, the cold-start problem, and tedium problem) need to be addressed to develop more effective LBRSs. In this paper, we propose a novel POI recommendation system, called LACF-Rec3, which employs a hybrid approach of link analysis (HITS-3) and collaborative filtering (CF-3) based on three visiting behaviors: frequency, variety, and repetition. HITS-3 identifies distinctive POIs based on user- and POI-visit patterns, ranks them accordingly, and recommends them to cold-start users. For existing users, CF-3 utilizes collaborative filtering based on their previous check-in history and POI distinctive aspects. Our experimental results conducted on a Foursquare dataset demonstrate that LACF-Rec3 outperforms prior methods in terms of recommendation accuracy, ranking precision, and matching ratio. In addition, LACF-Rec3 effectively solves the challenges of data sparsity, the cold-start issue, and tedium problems for cold-start and existing users. These findings highlight the potential of LACF-Rec3 as a promising solution to the challenges encountered by LBRS.

Bias characterization, assessment, and mitigation in location-based recommender systems

Location-Based Social Networks stimulated the rise of services such as Location-based Recommender Systems. These systems suggest to users points of interest (or venues) to visit when they arrive in a specific city or region. These recommendations impact various stakeholders in society, like the users who receive the recommendations and venue owners. Hence, if a recommender generates biased or polarized results, this affects in tangible ways both the experience of the users and the providers’ activities. In this paper, we focus on four forms of polarization, namely venue popularity, category popularity, venue exposure, and geographical distance. We characterize them on different families of recommendation algorithms when using a realistic (temporal-aware) offline evaluation methodology while assessing their existence. Besides, we propose two automatic approaches to mitigate those biases. Experimental results on real-world data show that these approaches are able to jointly improve the recommendation effectiveness, while alleviating these multiple polarizations.

A Critical Review on Location Based Hybrid Filtering Recommender Systems

A recommender system is basically a type of information filtering system that suggests/recommends items based on the factors that constitute what the user is most interested in. The recommendations are typically provided in relation to different decision-making processes. Tourism is a social phenomenon where people deliberately travel in search of recreation, well-being, cultural exploration or get themselves softened up. But, the amount of information available online keeps expanding at exponential rates and thus the users have expressed their feeling of frustration at how challenging it is to find the appropriate information. This problem is called information overload. This is where the recommendation system comes into play which helps in solving the information overload problem. The hybrid system addresses the disadvantages where location-based recommendation systems are used individually, of which the most notable is the cold start issue. Furthermore, in order to improve the accuracy of the prediction to recommend items, these systems search for the ideal fusion of different approaches. Thus, the hybrid recommendation method solves the challenges like ‘cold start problem’, inability to capture changes in user behavior, sparsity and selecting correct choices for users. This paper explores the hybrid recommendation systems and other filtering techniques used in various fields, their challenges, how they can also be used for tourism recommender systems based on the longitudes and latitudes.

N-Most Interesting Location-based Recommender System

The popular and ubiquitous location-based social networks (LBSNs) ap-peal many users for sharing interesting locations with other users. As the collected data (such as users' profiles, location comment, and suggestion) become a lot larger in size, location-based recommender systems require more effective fillters to be able to suggest potentially preferable locations to users. Location recommendation is more difficult and challenging especially if users have few or no check-in histories as a new user. Therefore, instead of depending on users' check-in histories, previous works focused on creating recommended location lists by leveraging the information given by other users who check in locations in each area. However, previous studies took into account only the frequencies of users for creating recommendation lists and have su˙ered from the cold-start problem where new users have few or none histories. As a result, the recommenders hardly suggest any locations matching the users' preference. In this paper, we propose an enhanced location-recommendation approach called N-most interesting location-based recommender system (NILR) to recommend interesting lo-cations for new users. Our approach can be divided into three phases. First, the NILR discovers interesting locations by taking into account both the visiting frequencies and the preferences of users already in the system. Second, a ranking procedure is executed to create a final recommendation list based on two interestingness scores: one obtained from the HITS-based model (as adopted by [1] and [2]) and the other from our proposed method. Finally, we re-filter interesting locations based on the current location of the new user. Experimental results reveal the NIRL can reach better precision, recall, average ranking and NDGC than HITS by 6%, 6%, 30%and 8% for Tokyo and 24%, 30%, 43% and 15% for New York dataset, respectively.

Developing a Location-Based Recommender System Using Collaborative Filtering Technique in the Tourism Industry

The rapid growth of new information and products in the virtual environment has made it time consuming to acquire relevant information and knowledge amidst a vast amount of information. Therefore, an intelligent system that can offer the most appropriate and desirable among the large amount of information and products by following the conditions and features selected by each user should be essentially efficient. Systems that perform this task are called recommendation systems. Given the volume of social network data, challenges such as short-term processing and increased accuracy of recommendations are discussed in this type of system. Hence, it can perform processes faster with less error and can be effective in improving the performance of social recommending systems in improving the classification and clustering of information with the help of collaboration filtering methods. This study first develops an innovative conceptual model of a social network-based tourism recommendation system using Flicker network data. This model is based on 9 key components. The comparison show that the proposed method has an accuracy of 0.3% and a lower error rate.

Personal Privacy Data Protection in Location Recommendation System

At present, there are many location-based recommendation algorithms and systems, including location calculation, route calculation, and so on. However, in the general information data publishing, the privacy issues in the published data have not been fully paid attention to and protected. The purpose of this article is to investigate the effectiveness of personal privacy data protection in location recommendation systems. This paper first introduces the basis and importance of research on data security and secrecy, analyses personal privacy issues in data publishing in the era of big data, summarizes the research status in the field of security and secrecy at home and abroad, and introduces the process of data security and the role of users in it. Then, some classic privacy security modules in this field are introduced, and the privacy of data storage security concepts in the current situation mentioned in this paper is analyzed. A geographic location-based privacy protection scheme in mobile cloud is proposed. Privacy analysis, sensitive attribute generalization information analysis, route synthesis analysis and related experiments are performed on the location recommendation system. The experimental results show that the scheme proposed in this paper is more secure and has less loss of data availability.

Semantic Knowledge Discovery for User Profiling for Location-Based Recommender Systems

This paper introduces a purposed Location-based Recommender System (LBRS) that combines sentiment analysis and topic modelling techniques to improve user profiling for enhancing recommendations of Points of Interest (POIs). Using additional feature extraction, we built user profiles froma Foursquare dataset to evaluate our model and provide recommendations based on user opinions toward venues. Our combined model performed favourably against the baseline models, with an overall improved accuracy of 0.67. The limitations were the use of one dataset and that user profiles were constructed using predicted emotions extracted as features from review data with topic modelling, rather than literal user emotions. Nevertheless, this provides a step forward in user profile and emotion scoring, contributing further to the development of LBRS in the Tourism domain.

A deep learning based approach for trajectory estimation using geographically clustered data

This study presents a novel approach to predict a complete source to destination trajectory of a vehicle using a partial trajectory query. The proposed architecture is scalable to extremely large-scale data with respect to the dense road network. A deep learning model Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) has been used for analyzing the temporal data and predicting the complete trajectory. To handle a large amount of data, clustering of similar trajectory data is used that helps in reducing the search space. The clusters based on geographical locations and temporal values are used for training different LSTM models. The proposed approach is compared with the other published work on the parameters as Average distance error and one step prediction accuracy The one-step prediction accuracy is as good as 81% and Distance error are .33 Km. Our proposed approach termed Clustered LSTM is outperforming in both the parameters when compared with other reported results. The proposed solution is a clustering-based predictive model that effectively contributes to accurately handle the large scale data. The outcome of this study leads to improvise the navigation systems, route prediction, traffic management, and location-based recommendation systems.

Experimental Analysis of Friend-And-Native Based Location Awareness for Accurate Collaborative Filtering

Location-based recommender systems have gained a lot of attention in both commercial domains and research communities where there are various approaches that have shown great potential for further studies. However, there has been little attention in previous research on location-based recommender systems for generating recommendations considering the locations of target users. Such recommender systems sometimes recommend places that are far from the target user’s current location. In this paper, we explore the issues of generating location recommendations for users who are traveling overseas by taking into account the user’s social influence and also the native or local expert’s knowledge. Accordingly, we have proposed a collaborative filtering recommendation framework called the Friend-And-Native-Aware Approach for Collaborative Filtering (FANA-CF), to generate reasonable location recommendations for users. We have validated our approach by systematic and extensive experiments using real-world datasets collected from Foursquare TM. By comparing algorithms such as the collaborative filtering approach (item-based collaborative filtering and user-based collaborative filtering) and the personalized mean approach, we have shown that our proposed approach has slightly outperformed the conventional collaborative filtering approach and personalized mean approach.

A store location-based recommender system using user’s position and web searches

ABSTRACT Nowadays, gathering information about commercial products can be performed either online or offline. While online searches can be virtually undertaken through online shopping websites, offline searches should be done physically at stores. However, there is a specific emerging trend where users can check some product opportunities online before getting to the stores and then possibly buying some items whose properties have already been evaluated over the Web. Product properties can be studied online while on site evaluation provides a direct contact with these goods at the stores. The objective of the approach developed in this paper is to discover user preferences when searching and exploring online shopping websites and then recommend the stores that better match their interests. First, users’ internet behaviours are extracted from an online shopping website. Secondly, a Voronoi high-dimensional structure supports the derivation of similarities between the users and stores. Third, a distance matrix between the user and the selected stores is generated. Finally, a ranked list of the most appropriate stores is provided to the users based on their product interest and their locations. The whole approach has been successfully tested by a panel of 30 volunteers in the 6th District of the city of Tehran.

A location based novel recommender framework of user interest through data categorization

An efficient location-based recommender system in the digital era enables new dimensions of business and service opportunities to all its stake holders. The data from a particular geographical location will be collected according to their lifestyle and categorized. Increasing the use of social media, overwhelming digital information flow in every user movement will create a new array of dimensions for an online or offline business. The location-based recommender system effectively serves its users in the best possible way as per their interests. The user requirements of their interests will be served effectively as per their interests and location. The location-based recommender system will build new avenues in the business domain. This paper presents the introduction to geographical location-based recommender systems—a detailed review of various recommender systems based on geographical regions. Identify the parameters to categorize the users and a proposed model for location-based recommender systems.One of the most widely used approach for providing personalized services to customers is the Collaborative filtering technique. Similarity between users based on user-item rating matrix is the key essence of this approach for providing recommendations to users. Similarity algorithms like cosine, manhatten, euclidean etc. play a prominent role in determining similarity between users. Our proposed paper presents an innovative approach for enhancing prediction using machine learning for unrated items. Along with local context information global preference of user behavior is also taken into account. Experiments for our proposed system are carried on MovieLens dataset using machine learning. Performance enhancement can be seen in our proposed model.

A new location‐based privacy protection algorithm with deep learning

AbstractA location‐based recommender system (LbRS) is a system which provides recommendations to a user related to his/her point of interest. In order to generate these recommendations, the LbRS uses personal information regarding the current location of the user. This creates serious privacy issues, as users' movements can be revealed through their location data. This paper proposes a new location‐based privacy protection method, and is divided into two stages. First, dummy locations are identified using query probability and distance. Second, a deep learning algorithm is trained to predict dummy locations. Then, the average entropy of each stage is used to compute final entropy. The results show that the proposed method outperforms standard methods such as random and farthest dummy location selection, although it is fractionally slower than the benchmark methods due to the encryption mechanism integrated into it to provide double‐layer security.

Trajectory Based Location Prediction and Enriched Ontological User Profiles for Efficient Website Recommendation

The spread over of huge amount of information in the vast area of internet makes difficult for the users to obtain the search items that are relevant to them. The adoption of web usage mining helps to discover the accurate search results that satisfy their requirements. To fulfill their need, it is necessary to know their preferences of search at various contexts. In general, the user profiles are used to determine the taste of the users. The traditional method of user profiling does not provide a complete detail regarding their search. In addition, the search preference of the individuals varies in accordance with time and location. The user profiles do not update the dynamic location changes of the users. The traditional location based recommendation systems suggest the search results based on their location to compensate the dynamic preferences of the users. The drawbacks of the conventional systems are resolved by the Location and User Profile (LUP) based recommendation system. To attain a higher user satisfaction by providing accurate search results, a trajectory based location prediction and enriched ontological user profiles to recommend the appropriate websites to the users is proposed in this paper. In this article, we suggest a novel method for predicting the location of a user’s profile using Semantic Trajectory Pattern (STP), based on both the place and semantic features of user trajectories. Our prediction model ‘s central concept is based on a novel cluster-based prediction approach that evaluates the location of user search data based on the regular activities of related users in the same cluster, calculated by evaluating the typical behavior of users in semantic trajectories. The combination of location information along with enriched ontological user profiles improves the efficiency of the proposed web recommendation system. The experimental results are evaluated using recall, precision and F-measure metrics.

The Relationship between Online Social Network Ties and User Attributes

The distance between users has an effect on the formation of social network ties, but it is not the only or even the main factor. Knowing all the features that influence such ties is very important for many related domains such as location-based recommender systems and community and event detection systems for online social networks (OSNs). In recent years, researchers have analyzed the role of user geo-location in OSNs. Researchers have also attempted to determine the probability of friendships being established based on distance, where friendship is not only a function of distance. However, some important features of OSNs remain unknown. In order to comprehensively understand the OSN phenomenon, we also need to analyze users’ attributes. Basically, an OSN functions according to four main user properties: user geo-location, user weight, number of user interactions, and user lifespan. The research presented here sought to determine whether the user mobility pattern can be used to predict users’ interaction behavior. It also investigated whether, in addition to distance, the number of friends (known as user weight) interferes in social network tie formation. To this end, we analyzed the above-stated features in three large-scale OSNs. We found that regardless of a high degree freedom in user mobility, the fraction of the number of outside activities over the inside activity is a significant fraction that helps us to address the user interaction behavior. To the best of our knowledge, research has not been conducted elsewhere on this issue. We also present a high-resolution formula in order to improve the friendship probability function.

Hybrid Location-based Recommender System for Mobility and Travel Planning

In recent times, the modern developments of internet technologies and social networks have attracted global researchers to explore the recommender systems for generating personalized location-based services. Recommender Systems (RSs) as proven decision support tools have gained immense popularity to solve information overloading problem among various real-time applications of e-commerce, travel and tourism, movies and e-learning. RSs emerge as a popular and reliable information filtering approach that is capable of suggesting relevant items, movies, and locations to the active target user based on dynamic preferences and interests. Beyond the development of many feature-rich recommendation algorithms, the need for a better full-fledged RS to produce precise and highly relevant recommendations based on ratings and preferences provided by the target user is very high. With the specific focus to the travel domain, the global research community has been involved in the development of a complete travel recommender system that is immune to the sparsity and cold start problems. In this paper, we present a new Hybrid Location-based Travel Recommender System (HLTRS) through exploiting ensemble based co-training method with swarm intelligence algorithms to enhance the personalized travel recommendations. The proposed HLTRS is experimentally validated on the real-world large-scale dataset, and we have made an extensive user study to determine the ability of developed RS to produce user satisfiable recommendations in real-time scenarios. The obtained results and analyses demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed Hybrid Location-based Travel Recommender System over existing baselines of recommender systems research.

Mining social networks for local search and location-based recommender systems

Mining social networks for local search and location-based recommender systems

Achieving High Privacy Protection in Location-based Recommendation Systems

In recent years, privacy has become great attention in the research community. In Location-based Recommendation Systems (LbRSs), the user is constrained to build queries depend on his actual position to search for the closest points of interest (POIs). An external attacker can analyze the sent queries or track the actual position of the LbRS user to reveal his\her personal information. Consequently, ensuring high privacy protection (which is including location privacy and query privacy) is a fundamental thing. In this paper, we propose a model that guarantees high privacy protection for LbRS users. The model is work by three components: The first component (selector) uses a new location privacy protection approach, namely, the smart dummy selection (SDS) approach. The SDS approach generates a strong dummy position that has high resistance versus a semantic position attack. The second component (encryptor) uses an encryption-based approach that guarantees a high level of query privacy versus a sampling query attack. The last component (constructor) constructs the protected query that is sent to the LbRS server. Our proposed model is supported by a checkpoint technique to ensure a high availability quality attribute. Our proposed model yields competitive results compared to similar models under various privacy and performance metrics.

An interval type 2 hesitant fuzzy MCDM approach and a fuzzy c means clustering for retailer clustering

Owing to the advancements in information and telecommunication technologies, mobile location-based services are able to use previously collected mobile check-in data. This multi-dimensional data can provide new opportunities for research problems such as establishing new platforms for location-based advertising and location-based personalized recommendations. In other words, location data of potential customers indicate personal interests and visiting preferences. In some cases, customers’ preferences could not be easily determined or predicted while considering visiting patterns of mobile users. In this respect, this study provides a novel retailer segmentation approach based on multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) combined fuzzy data clustering. The proposed model consists of two phases: (1) an interval type 2 hesitant MCDM approach for the determination of location perceived value and (2) retailer (store) clustering via different product sale prices with fuzzy data-based fuzzy c means (FcM) clustering. Proposed approach enables the simplification of FcM clustering adaptation to non-symmetric fuzzy data using dissimilarity measure. Using this integrated approach, advertisers and recommender system suppliers will be able to manage their product-special offerings to customers considering retailer segments and shopping mall characteristics. Additionally, the proposed approach constitutes the infrastructure of location-based recommender systems under imprecise environment.

A study of neighbour selection strategies for POI recommendation in LBSNs

Location-based recommender systems (LBRSs) are gaining importance with the proliferation of location-based services provided by mobile devices as well as user-generated content in social networks. Collaborative approaches for recommendation rely on the opinions of like-minded people, so-called neighbours, for prediction. Thus, an adequate selection of such neighbours becomes essential for achieving good prediction results. The aim of this work is to explore different strategies to select neighbours in the context of a collaborative filtering–based recommender system for POI (places of interest) recommendations. Whereas standard methods are based on user similarity to delimit a neighbourhood, in this work several strategies are proposed based on direct social relationships and geographical information extracted from location-based social networks (LBSNs). The impact of the different strategies proposed has been evaluated and compared against the traditional collaborative filtering approach using a dataset from a popular network as Foursquare. In general terms, the proposed strategies for selecting neighbours based on the different elements available in a LBSN achieve better results than the traditional collaborative filtering approach. Our findings can be helpful both to researchers in the recommender systems area and to recommender system developers in the context of LBSNs, since they can take into account our results to design and provide more effective services considering the huge amount of knowledge produced in LBSNs.

A comparative study of location-based recommendation systems

AbstractRecent advancements in location-based recommendation system (LBRS) and the availability of online applications, such as Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Path, and Facebook have introduced new research challenges in the area of LBRS. Use of content, such as geo-tagged media, point location-based, and trajectory-based information help in connecting the gap between the online social networking services and the physical world. In this article, we present a systematic review of the scientific literature of LBRS and summarize the efforts and contributions proposed in the literature. We have performed a qualitative comparison of the existing techniques used in the area of LBRS. We present the basic filtration techniques used in LBRS followed by a discussion on the services and the location features the LBRS utilizes to perform the recommendations. The classification of criteria for recommendations and evaluation metrics are also presented. We have critically investigated the techniques proposed in the literature for LBRS and extracted the challenges and promising research topics for future work.