Heterogeneous item recommendation for the air travel industry

Abstract

Analyzing the travel behaviors and patterns of air passengers have always been of great significance to the air travel industry. Understanding the demands and interests of passengers behind their behaviors is a crucial and fundamental task for many applications. However, this task is challenging due to the lack of customer information, data sparsity, and the long-tail distribution. In this paper, we investigate the problem of heterogeneous item recommendation by learning representations of items and passengers in a shared latent space. Specifically, we first establish a heterogeneous information network (HIN) through statistical analysis, where the edges represent the interactions between different nodes. Each node also contains some auxiliary attribute information that describes its travel behavior or that of its passenger groups. Then we devise a joint matrix factorization model to learn node representations based on the HIN, where both the heterogeneous edges and the node attributes are incorporated into the learning process. Moreover, a weighting strategy is further utilized to deal with the long-tail distribution of passenger behaviors based on the implicit feedback information. Experimental results conducted on a real-world passenger name record (PNR) dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.