Point-of-interest recommendation using temporal orientations of users and locations

Abstract

Location Based Social Networks (LBSN) promotes communications among subscribers. Utilizing online check-in data supplied via LBSN, Point-Of-Interest (POI) recommendation systems propose unvisited relevant venues to the users. Various techniques have been designed for POI recommendation systems. However, diverse temporal information has not been studied adequately. From temporal perspective, as visited locations during weekday and weekend are marginally different, we choose weekly intervals to improve effectiveness of POI recommenders. However, our method is also applicable to other similar periodic intervals. People usually visit tourist and leisure spots during weekends and work related places during weekdays. Similarly, some users perform check-ins mostly during weekend, while others prefer weekday predominantly. In this paper, we define a new problem to perform recommendation, based on temporal weekly alignments of users and POIs. We argue that locations with higher popularity should be more influential. Therefore, In order to solve the problem, we develop a probabilistic model which initially detects a user’s temporal orientation based on visibility weights of POIs visited by her. As a step further, we develop a recommender framework that proposes proper POIs to the user according to her temporal weekly preference. Moreover, we take succeeding POI pairs visited by the same user into consideration to develop a more efficient temporal model to handle geographical information. Extensive experimental results on two large-scale LBSN datasets verify that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art recommendation techniques.