Influence-Aware Successive Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Abstract

In recent years, with the rapid development of mobile applications, user check-in histories have been increasing. Successive point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has gained growing attention. Existing successive point-of-interest recommendation methods learn long- and short-term user preferences through historical check-in sequences to provide more personalized services. However, due to sparse data and complicated temporal patterns, the application of such technique is still limited by two challenges: 1) difficulty meeting user travel needs in time; 2) difficulty capturing users complicated behavior patterns. To address this problem, we propose a new Influence-Aware successive POI recommendation Model (InfAM), which can learn the influence of POIs in a short-term sequence fragment for next point-of-interest recommendation. To capture periodic patterns of user movements, InfAM takes a user’s check-in data within a day as an input sequence to address the current travel needs of the user. In addition, based on multihead attention mechanism and user embedding, InfAM focuses on the influence of POIs in short-term sequences and general user preferences in these sequences. Therefore, InfAM integrates three specific dependencies, which can fully learn the dynamic interaction between short-term preferences: the influence of POIs in short-term sequence fragments (POI-poi), user preferences (POI-user), and the periodicity of check-ins (POI-time). Evaluation results on real-world datasets show that InfAM achieves state-of-the-art recommendation performance.