MTPR: A multi-task learning based POI recommendation considering temporal check-ins and geographical locations

Abstract

The rapid development of location-based social networks (LBSNs) produces the increasing number of check-in records and corresponding heterogeneous information which bring big challenges of points-of-interest (POIs) recommendation in our daily lives. The emergence of various recommender techniques bridges the gap between the numerous heterogeneous check-ins and the personalized POI recommendation. However, due to the differences between LBSNs and conventional recommendation tasks, besides the user feedback, the spatio-temporal information is also significant to precisely capture the user preferences. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning model based POI recommender system which exploits a structure of generative adversarial networks (GAN) simultaneously considering temporal check-ins and geographical locations. The GAN-based model is capable of relieving the sparsity of check-in data in POI recommender systems. The temporal check-ins not only present the preference but also show the lifestyle of an individual while the geographical locations describe the active region of users which further filters POIs far from the feasible region. The multi-task learning strategy is capable of combining the information of temporal check-ins and geographical locations to improve the performance of personalized POI recommendation. We conduct the experiments on two real-world LBSNs datasets and the experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.