Point-of-interest Recommendation Methods Research Articles

Modeling multi-factor user preferences based on Transformer for next point of interest recommendation

With the rapid development of the mobile network and the gradual popularization of mobile devices, more and more users try to find attractive places to visit through WeChat, Twitter applications. In this trend, personalized next point of interest(POI) recommendation in the Location-based Social Network (LBSN) has become the focus of research and practice. Most existing studies capture user interest changes between different days (i.e. weekend and weekday), however, they ignore seasonal factors in time transition and category factors and thus fail to capture seasonal-level and category-level movement patterns in users’ mobile trajectories. Besides, they neglect the relevance between POIs from all users’ trajectory and fail to generate expressive POI embedding representation without constructing trajectory graph, which will reduce the accuracy of the next POI recommendation. To address the issues above, a next POI recommendation method for modeling Multi-factor User Preferences based on Transformer (MUPT) is developed, which consists of a global POI relationship modeling, a local multi-factor user preference modeling and a prediction module. It first learns the collaborative information of users with similar behavior to generate expressive POI embedding representation. Then it captures the personalized movement patterns of users at the POI, category and time levels based on Transformer mechanism in the local module. Especially the seasonal and other fine-grained information on the time series are learned in the time preference modeling part. The prediction module designed tracks the relationship between multi-level motion pattern representation of user check-in behavior and the next POI accessed by the user, and it finally obtains user’s preference probability for next POIs. An extensive experiment has been conducted on four datasets, and the experimental results analysis demonstrates that our proposed MUPT method is superior to other methods in terms of accuracy(ACC), mean reciprocal rank(MRR) and normalized discounted cumulative gain(NDCG).

Personalized POI Recommendation Using CAGRU and Implicit Semantic Feature Extraction in LBSN

With the intention of addressing the concern that existing point of interest recommendation methods fail to fully utilize the auxiliary information of the point of interest, from which it is challenging to extricate a substantial quantity of deeper feature information, a personalized point of interest (POI) recommendation model using Context-Aware Gated Recurrent Unit (CAGRU) and implicit semantic feature extraction was proposed. First, the check-in data is divided into five tags, and the continuous geographical location check-in data and time data are discretized. Then, the CAGRU was used to obtain the POI check-in features. Finally, the time sequence location information, user information and target location information are transformed through the nonlinear activation function to obtain the score of each location in the data set as the next POI location, and the Top-N recommendation is generated through the score. Experiments indicated that the results of the suggested method were better than the comparative methods.

KDRank: Knowledge-driven user-aware POI recommendation

Accurate user modeling is crucial for point-of-interest (POI) recommendation as it can significantly improve user satisfaction with recommended POIs and enrich user experience. However, existing methods typically rely on simple time-series models for user check-in sequences, which ignore similar information of global users and fail to capture the user-preference knowledge hidden in complex social networks. To address this issue, we propose a novel knowledge-driven and user-aware POI recommendation method called KDRank. First, we construct a knowledge graph containing users’ personal attributes for POI recommendation, which can reflect users’ historical check-in preferences. Second, we derive users’ knowledge representations using a cross-embedding method, which facilitates feature interaction by sharing information between segments of knowledge representations to achieve a more precise representation of low-dimensional embedding. Third, we propose a knowledge aggregation module to combine users’ knowledge and historical check-in features to achieve knowledge enhancement of check-in data. Furthermore, to enhance global user awareness of our model, we introduce an attention mechanism that focuses on the most similar and significant users in the global context. It allows KDRank to capture more personalized user preferences and increases the precision of POI recommendations. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated on two real datasets, and the results indicated its ability to increase the POI recommendation accuracy. The code associated with this study is available at https://github.com/itshardtocode/KDRank.

Attention-Based Time Sequence and Distance Contexts Gated Recurrent Unit for Personalized POI Recommendation

Aiming at the problems resulting from the fact that the existing point of interest (POI) recommendation methods cannot effectively consider the personalized differences of users' mobile behavior in space and time, the author proposes a personalized POI recommendation method using attention-based time sequence and distance contexts gated recurrent unit (ATSD-GRU). First, the author combined the time sequence and distance context with the GRU to extract useful information from users, effectively alleviating the data sparsity. Second, inspired by the attention mechanism, the author introduced the attention model further into the neural network to capture the user's main mobile behavior intention. Finally, the author studied the ATSD-GRU and trained through Bayesian personalized sorting framework and back propagation algorithm. Experiments imply that the proposed method outperforms the comparison method in terms of the F1 index for any recommended number. When the recommendation list length is 15, the proposed algorithm exhibits an accuracy of 9.23% and a recall rate of 14.65%, both higher than the compared algorithm.

Next POI Recommendation with Dynamic Graph and Explicit Dependency

Next Point-Of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays an important role in various location-based services. Its main objective is to predict the user's next interested POI based on her previous check-in information. Most existing methods directly use users' historical check-in trajectories to construct various graphs to assist sequential models to complete this task. However, as users' check-in data is extremely sparse, it is difficult to capture the potential relations between POIs by directly using these check-in data. To this end, we propose the Sequence-based Neighbour search and Prediction Model (SNPM) for next POI recommendation. In SNPM, the RotatE knowledge graph embedding and Eigenmap methods are used to extract POI relationships implied in check-in data, and build the POI similarity graph. Then, we enhance the model's generalized representations of POIs' general features by aggregating similar POIs. As the context is typically rich and valuable when making Next POI predictions, the sequence model selects which POIs to aggregate not only depends on the current state, but also needs to consider the previous POI sequence. Therefore, we construct a Sequence-based, Dynamic Neighbor Graph (SDNG) to find the similarity neighbourhood and develop a Multi-Step Dependency Prediction model (MSDP) inspired by RotatE, which explicitly leverage information from previous states. We evaluate the proposed model on two real-world datasets, and the experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art POI recommendation methods.

STA-TCN: Spatial-temporal Attention over Temporal Convolutional Network for Next Point-of-interest Recommendation

Recent years have witnessed a vastly increasing popularity of location-based social networks (LBSNs), which facilitates studies on the next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation problem. A user’s POI visiting behavior shows the sequential transition correlation with previous successive check-ins and the global spatial-temporal correlation with those check-ins that happened a long time ago at a similar time of day and in geographically close areas. Although previous POI recommendation methods attempted to capture these two correlations, several limitations remain to be solved: (1) RNNs are widely adopted to capture the sequential transition correlation, whereas training an RNN is rather time-consuming given the long input check-in sequence. (2) The pairwise proximities on time of day and geographical area of check-ins are crucial for global spatial-temporal correlation learning, but have not been comprehensively considered by previous methods. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel next POI recommendation framework named STA-TCN. Specifically, instead of RNNs, STA-TCN augments the Temporal Convolutional Network with gated input injection to learn sequential transition correlation. Furthermore, STA-TCN fuses two novel grid-difference and time-sensitivity learning mechanisms with attention network to learn the pairwise spatial-temporal proximities among a user’s check-ins. Extensive experiments are conducted on two large-scale real-world LBSN datasets, and the results show that STA-TCN outperforms the best state-of-the-art baseline with an average improvement of 9.71% and 7.88% on hit rate and normalized discounted cumulative gain, respectively.

Muti-channel graph attention networks for POI recommendation

This paper focuses on the task of Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation whose goal is to generate a list of POIs for a target user based on his or her history check-in records. Different from the traditional recommendation tasks (e.g., movie recommendation), there are many factors, like temporal factor and geographical factor, which make a great influence on user preference. Though existing POI recommendation methods tend to model the user preference from temporal factor, geographical factor or social factor, they fail to model these factors into a jointly model, leading to learn the suboptimal user preference. To tackle this issue, we propose a Muti-channel Graph Attention Network (MGAN) for POI recommendation which learns the user preference from multiple aspects in a unify model. Specifically, MGAN first constructs several graphs with corresponding contextual features to capture the user preference from temporal, geographical, semantic and social aspects. Then MGAN leverages the graph attention networks to learn the representations of POIs from these graphs. Finally, MGAN estimates the user preference from the history check-in records and other similar users via the learned POI representations. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets. And the results indicate that our proposed MGAN outperforms mainstream POI recommendation methods.

Point of Interest Recommendation Method Based on Bidirectional Matrix and Deep Belief Network

AbstractPoint‐of‐interest (POI) recommendation has always faced serious data sparsity problem. Most of the existing POI recommendation methods do not consider the bidirectional relationship between the user‐preference for locations and the location‐ attractiveness to users in the original dataset when solving the sparsity. For this problem, a point‐of‐interest recommendation method based on bidirectional matrix and deep belief network (POI_DBNBM) is proposed in this paper. Specially, from the perspectives of users and locations, we first construct two different matrices with bidirectional relationship by mapping the original dataset, and we use deep belief network (DBN) with strong learning ability to predict the two matrices. Then, a local–global weight optimization method is developed to weight and fuse the two result matrices obtained by DBN, so as to achieve the more precise user's rating prediction matrix for locations. The abundant experimental studies and evaluations are conducted on FourSquare dataset. Results are encouraging and better than those previously reported on the dataset. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Context-Aware Point-of-Interest Recommendation Based on Similar User Clustering and Tensor Factorization

The rapid development of big data technology and mobile intelligent devices has led to the development of location-based social networks (LBSNs). To understand users’ behavioral patterns and improve the accuracy of location-based services, point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has become an important task. In contrast to the general task of product recommendation, POI recommendation faces the problems of the sparsity and weak semantics of user check-in data. To address these issues, an increasing number of studies have improved the accuracy of POI recommendations by introducing contextual information such as geographical, temporal, textual, and social relations. However, the rich context also brings great challenges to POI recommendation, such as the low utilization rate of context information, difficulty in balancing the richness of contextual information, and the complexity of the recommendation matrix. Considering that similar users have more interest preferences in common than users generally have, the check-in information of similar users has greater reference meaning. Thus, we propose a personalized POI recommendation method named CULT-TF, which incorporates similar users’ contextual information into the tensor factorization model. First, we present a user activity model and a user similarity model, which integrate contextual information to calculate the user activity and similarity between users. According to user activity, the most representative active users are selected as user clustering centers, and then users are clustered based on user similarity into several similar user clusters (C). Next, we construct a third-order tensor (user-location-time matrix) for each user cluster by using user activity, POI popularity, and time slot popularity as the eigenvalues in the user (U), location (L), and time (T) dimensions, and the eigenvalue of each dimension is modeled by integrating contextual information of users’ check-in behavior at the user, location, and time levels. Similar user clustering reduces the number of users in tensor modeling, reducing the U dimension. To further reduce the complexity of the recommendation matrix, the reduction of the L dimension is achieved through ROI (region of interest) clustering, and the reduction of the T dimension is achieved through time slot encoding. Then, we use tensor factorization (TF) to obtain the recommendation results. Our method decreases the complexity of the tensor matrix and integrates rich contextual information on users’ check-in behavior. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive performance evaluation of CULT-TF using real-world LBSN datasets from Brightkite. The experimental results show that our proposed method performs much better than other recommendation methods in terms of precision and recall.

A Next POI Recommendation Based on Graph Convolutional Network by Adaptive Time Patterns

Users’ activities in location-based social networks (LBSNs) can be naturally transformed into graph structural data, and more advanced graph representation learning techniques can be adopted for analyzing user preferences, which benefits a variety of real-world applications. This paper focuses on the next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation task in LBSNs. We argue that existing graph-based POI recommendation methods only consider user preferences from several individual contextual factors, ignoring the influence of interactions between different contextual information. This practice leads to the suboptimal learning of user preferences. To address this problem, we propose a novel method called hierarchical attention-based graph convolutional network (HAGCN) for the next POI recommendation, a technique which leverages graph convolutional networks to extract the representations of POIs from predefined graphs via different time patterns and develops a hierarchical attention mechanism to adaptively learn user preferences from the interactions between different contextual data. Moreover, HAGCN uses a dynamic preference estimation to precisely learn user preferences. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to evaluate the performance of HAGCN against representative baseline models in the field of next POI recommendation. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method on the next POI recommendation task.

PRMF: point of interest recommendation method integrating multiple factors

PRMF: point of interest recommendation method integrating multiple factors

PRMF: point of interest recommendation method integrating multiple factors

PRMF: point of interest recommendation method integrating multiple factors

Understanding User Preferences in Location-Based Social Networks via a Novel Self-Attention Mechanism

The check-in behaviors of users are ubiquitous in location-based social networks in urban living. Understanding user preferences is critical to improving the recommendation services of social platforms. In addition, great quality of recommendation is also beneficial to sustainable urban living since the user can easily find the point of interest (POI) to visit, which avoids unnecessary consumption, such as a longer time taken for searching or driving. To capture user preferences from their check-in behaviors, advanced methods transform historical records into graph structure data and further leverage graph deep learning-based techniques to learn user preferences. Despite their effectiveness, existing graph deep learning-based methods are limited to the capture of the deep graph’s structural information due to inherent limitations, such as the over-smoothing problem in graph neural networks, further leading to suboptimal performance. To address the above issues, we propose a novel method built on Transformer architecture named spatiotemporal aware transformer (STAT) via a novel graphically aware attention mechanism. In addition, a new temporally aware sampling strategy is developed to reduce the computational cost and enable STAT to deal with large graphs. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets have demonstrated the superiority of the STAT compared to state-of-the-art POI recommendation methods.

Mapping user interest into hyper-spherical space: A novel POI recommendation method

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation helps users quickly filter out irrelevant POI by considering the spatio-temporal factor. In this paper, we address the problem of check-in preference modeling in POI recommendation, and propose a novel POI recommendation method that depicts user preference by constructing unique hypersphere interest model for each user. Different from existing works, we have done three innovative work. (1) We build a check-in graph and adopt DeepWalk algorithm to learn POI embedding, further aggregating them to obtain a hypersphere interest space with an interest center and interest radius. (2) We established a stacked neural network module by a bidirectional LSTM, a self-attention and a memory network, to grasp memory features contained in check-in histories. (3) We proposed a novel candidate POI filter method that updates ranking score by evaluating the Euclidean distance between the vectors of candidate POI and interest center. We evaluate the performance of our method on the four real-world check-in datasets constructed from Foursquare. The comparison between our method and six baselines demonstrates the outstanding performance on various measurements. Compared to the best baseline method, our method achieves about 50% performance improvement on NDCG. In terms of MRR, Precision and Recall, our method achieves about 37%, 21% and 9% performance improvement over the best baseline method. Further ablation experiments verified the importance and effectiveness of the hypersphere interest model, as removing this component caused significant performance degradation.

POI Recommendation Method of Neural Matrix Factorization Integrating Auxiliary Attribute Information

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is the prevalent personalized service in location-based social networks (LBSNs). A single use of matrix factorization (MF) or deep neural networks cannot effectively capture the complex structure of user–POI interactions. In addition, to alleviate the data-sparsity problem, current methods primarily introduce the auxiliary information of users and POIs. Auxiliary information is often judged to be equally valued, which will dissipate some of the valuable information. Hence, we propose a novel POI recommendation method fusing auxiliary attribute information based on the neural matrix factorization, integrating the convolutional neural network and attention mechanism (NueMF-CAA). First, the k-means and term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) algorithms are used to mine the auxiliary attribute information of users and POIs from user check-in data to alleviate the data-sparsity problem. A convolutional neural network and an attention mechanism are applied to learn the expression of auxiliary attribute information and distinguish the importance of auxiliary attribute information, respectively. Then, the auxiliary attribute information feature vectors of users and POIs are concatenated with their respective latent feature vectors to obtain the complete latent feature vectors of users and POIs. Meanwhile, generalized matrix factorization (GMF) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) are used to learn the linear and nonlinear interactions between users and POIs, respectively, and the last hidden layer is connected to integrate the two parts to alleviate the implicit feedback problem and make the recommendation results more interpretable. Experiments on two real-world datasets, the Foursquare dataset and the Weibo dataset, demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the evaluation metrics—hit ratio (HR) and normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG).

Multi-Graph Convolutional Network for Fine-Grained and Personalized POI Recommendation

With the advent of the era of rapid information expansion, the massive data backlog that exists on the Internet has led to a serious information overload problem, which makes recommendation systems a crucial part of human life. In particular, the Point-Of-Interest (POI) recommendation system has been applied to many real-life scenarios, such as life services and autonomous driving. Specifically, the goal of POI recommendation is to recommend locations that match their personalized preferences to users. In existing POI recommendation methods, people tend to pay more attention to the impact of temporal and spatial factors of POI on users, which will alleviate the problems of data sparsity and cold start in POI recommendation. However, this tends to ignore the differences among individual users, and considering only temporal and spatial attributes does not support fine-grained POI recommendations. To solve this problem, we propose a new Fine-grained POI Recommendation With Multi-Graph Convolutional Network (FP-MGCN). This model focuses on the content representation of POIs, captures users’ personalized preferences using semantic information from user comments, and learns fine-grained representations of users and POIs through the relationships between content–content, content–POI, and POI–user. FP-MGCN employs multiple embedded propagation layers and adopts information propagation mechanisms to model the higher-order connections of different POI-related relations for enhanced representation. Fine-grained POI is finally recommended to users through the three types of propagation we designed: content–content information propagation, content–POI information propagation, and POI–user information propagation. We have conducted detailed experiments on two datasets, and the results show that FP-MGCN has advanced performance and can alleviate the data sparsity problem in POI recommendation tasks.

A Point-of-Interest Recommendation Method Exploiting Sequential, Category and Geographical Influence

Point of interest (POI) recommendation as an important service in location-based social networks has developed rapidly, which can help users find more interesting unknown locations and facilitate service providers to provide users with more accurate notifications or advertisements. Some existing work has addressed the data sparsity problem of collaborative filtering by incorporating contextual information into the model. However, they ignore the sequence relationship contained in the user’s historical check-in records, which makes it difficult to accurately model the user’s preference and affects the final recommendation results. To acquire users’ preference for a location more accurately, this paper proposes a new POI recommendation framework exploiting sequential, category, and geographical influence. Firstly, we obtain the latent vector of POI and the latent vector of the user’s preference for POI from the user’s check-in sequence based on the word embedding model. Next, a virtual common access sequence for users is constructed according to the user’s check-ins, a new similarity computation method is present combining category differentiation and POI latent vector. Then, we apply it to the collaborative filtering framework to get the user’s behavioral preference probability of POI. In addition, the kernel density estimation method is employed to get the user’s geographical preference probability of POI by considering the geographical influence. Finally, the POI recommendation list is obtained by the weighted fusion of the two users’ preference probability to improve the performance of the POI recommendation. Experimental results on two datasets indicate that the proposed method has better performance in terms of three evaluation metrics than the other five POI recommendation methods.

POI recommendation method using LSTM-attention in LBSN considering privacy protection

Aiming at the problems of traditional point of interest (POI), such as sparse data, lack of negative feedback, and dynamic and periodic changes of user preferences, a POI recommendation method using deep learning in location-based social networks (LBSN) considering privacy protection is proposed. First, the idea of Embedding is used to quantify the user information, friend relationship, POI information, and so on, so as to obtain the internal relationship of the location. Then, based on the user's history and current POI check-in sequence set, the long- and short-term attention mechanism (LSA) is constructed, and the quantified information is used as the input of LSA to better capture the user's long-term and short-term preferences. Finally, the social network information and semantic information are fitted in different input layers, and the time and geographical location information of user's historical behavior are used to recommend the next POI for users. Gowalla and Brightkite datasets are used to demonstrate the proposed method. The results show that the performance of the proposed method is better than other comparison methods under different sparsity, location sequence length, and embedding length. When the number of iterations is 500, the recommended method tends to be stable, and the accuracy is 0.27. Moreover, the recommendation time of the proposed method is less than 130 ms, which is better than other comparative deep learning methods.

POI Recommendation Method Based on Multi-Source Information Fusion Using Deep Learning in Location-Based Social Networks

Sign-in point of interest (POI) are extremely sparse in location-based social networks, hindering recommendation systems from capturing users’ deep-level preferences. To solve this problem, we propose a content-aware POI recommendation algorithm based on a convolutional neural network. First, using convolutional neural networks to process comment text information, we model location POI and user latent factors. Subsequently, the objective function is constructed by fusing users’ geographical information and obtaining the emotional category information. In addition, the objective function comprises matrix decomposition and maximisation of the probability objective function. Finally, we solve the objective function efficiently. The prediction rate and F1 value on the Instagram-NewYork dataset are 78.32% and 76.37%, respectively, and those on the Instagram-Chicago dataset are 85.16% and 83.29%, respectively. Comparative experiments show that the proposed method can obtain a higher precision rate than several other newer recommended methods.

Incorporating Memory-Based Preferences and Point-of-Interest Stickiness into Recommendations in Location-Based Social Networks

In location-based social networks (LBSNs), point-of-interest (POI) recommendations facilitate access to information for people by recommending attractive locations they have not previously visited. Check-in data and various contextual factors are widely taken into consideration to obtain people’s preferences regarding POIs in existing POI recommendation methods. In psychological effect-based POI recommendations, the memory-based attenuation of people’s preferences with respect to POIs, e.g., the fact that more attention is paid to POIs that were checked in to recently than those visited earlier, is emphasized. However, the memory effect only reflects the changes in an individual’s check-in trajectory and cannot discover the important POIs that dominate their mobility patterns, which are related to the repeat-visit frequency of an individual at a POI. To solve this problem, in this paper, we developed a novel POI recommendation framework using people’s memory-based preferences and POI stickiness, named U-CF-Memory-Stickiness. First, we used the memory-based preference-attenuation mechanism to emphasize personal psychological effects and memory-based preference evolution in human mobility patterns. Second, we took the visiting frequency of POIs into consideration and introduced the concept of POI stickiness to identify the important POIs that reflect the stable interests of an individual with respect to their mobility behavior decisions. Lastly, we incorporated the influence of both memory-based preferences and POI stickiness into a user-based collaborative filtering framework to improve the performance of POI recommendations. The results of the experiments we conducted on a real LBSN dataset demonstrated that our method outperformed other methods.