Topic-enhanced memory networks for personalised point-of-interest recommendation

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommender systems play a vital role in people's lives by recommending unexplored POIs to users and have drawn extensive attention from both academia and industry. Despite their value, however, they still suffer from the challenges of capturing complicated user preferences and fine-grained user-POI relationship for spatio-temporal sensitive POI recommendation. Existing recommendation algorithms, including both shallow and deep approaches, usually embed the visiting records of a user into a single latent vector to model user preferences: this has limited power of representation and interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel topic-enhanced memory network (TEMN), a deep architecture to integrate the topic model and memory network capitalising on the strengths of both the global structure of latent patterns and local neighbourhood-based features in a nonlinear fashion. We further incorporate a geographical module to exploit user-specific spatial preference and POI-specific spatial influence to enhance recommendations. The proposed unified hybrid model is widely applicable to various POI recommendation scenarios. Extensive experiments on real-world WeChat datasets demonstrate its effectiveness (improvement ratio of 3.25% and 29.95% for context-aware and sequential recommendation, respectively). Also, qualitative analysis of the attention weights and topic modeling provides insight into the model's recommendation process and results.China Scholarship Council and Cambridge Trus

Category-Aware Location Embedding for Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Recently, Point of interest (POI) recommendation has gained ever-increasing importance in various Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs). With the recent advances of neural models, much work has sought to leverage neural networks to learn neural embeddings in a pre-training phase that achieve an improved representation of POIs and consequently a better recommendation. However, previous studies fail to capture crucial information about POIs such as categorical information. In this paper, we propose a novel neural model that generates a POI embedding incorporating sequential and categorical information from POIs. Our model consists of a check-in module and a category module. The check-in module captures the geographical influence of POIs derived from the sequence of users' check-ins, while the category module captures the characteristics of POIs derived from the category information. To validate the efficacy of the model, we experimented with two large-scale LBSN datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art POI recommendation methods.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure

Kernel-based Substructure Exploration for Next POI Recommendation

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation, which benefits from the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices and location-based social networks (LBSNs), plays an increasingly important role in recommender systems. It aims to provide users with the convenience to discover their interested places to visit based on previous visits and current status. Most existing methods usually merely leverage recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to explore sequential influences for recommendation. Despite the effectiveness, these methods not only neglect topological geographical influences among POIs, but also fail to model high-order sequential substructures. To tackle the above issues, we propose a Kernel-Based Graph Neural Network (KBGNN) for next POI recommendation, which combines the characteristics of both geographical and sequential influences in a collaborative way. KBGNN consists of a geographical module and a sequential module. On the one hand, we construct a geographical graph and leverage a message passing neural network to capture the topological geographical influences. On the other hand, we explore high-order sequential substructures in the user-aware sequential graph using a graph kernel neural network to capture user preferences. Finally, a consistency learning framework is introduced to jointly incorporate geographical and sequential information extracted from two separate graphs. In this way, the two modules effectively exchange knowledge to mutually enhance each other. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world LBSN datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method over the state-of-the-arts. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Fang6ang/KBGNN.Comment: Accepted by the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 202

RELINE: Point-of-Interest Recommendations using Multiple Network Embeddings

The rapid growth of users' involvement in Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) has led to the expeditious growth of the data on a global scale. The need of accessing and retrieving relevant information close to users' preferences is an open problem which continuously raises new challenges for recommendation systems. The exploitation of Points-of-Interest (POIs) recommendation by existing models is inadequate due to the sparsity and the cold start problems. To overcome these problems many models were proposed in the literature, but most of them ignore important factors such as: geographical proximity, social influence, or temporal and preference dynamics, which tackle their accuracy while personalize their recommendations. In this work, we investigate these problems and present a unified model that jointly learns users and POI dynamics. Our proposal is termed RELINE (REcommendations with muLtIple Network Embeddings). More specifically, RELINE captures: i) the social, ii) the geographical, iii) the temporal influence, and iv) the users' preference dynamics, by embedding eight relational graphs into one shared latent space. We have evaluated our approach against state-of-the-art methods with three large real-world datasets in terms of accuracy. Additionally, we have examined the effectiveness of our approach against the cold-start problem. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that significant performance improvement is achieved in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods