Recommending Personalized POIs from Location Based Social Network

Location based social networks（ LBSNs） provide location specific data generated from smart phone into online social networks thus people can share their points of interest（ POIs）. POI collections are complex and can be influenced by various factors,such as user preferences,social relationships and geographical influence. Therefore,recommending new locations in LBSNs requires to take all these factors into consideration. However,one problem is how to determine optimal weights of influencing factors in an algorithm in which these factors are combined. The user similarity can be obtained from the user check-in data,or from the user friend information,or based on the different geographical influences on each user＇s check-in activities. In this paper,we propose an algorithm that calculates the user similarity based on check-in records and social relationships,using a proposed weighting function to adjust the weights of these two kinds of similarities based on the geographical distance between users. In addition,a non-parametric density estimation method is applied to predict the unique geographical influence on each user by getting the density probability plot of the distance between every pair of user＇s check-in locations. Experimental results,using foursquare datasets,have shown that comparisons between the proposed algorithm and the other five baseline recommendation algorithms in LBSNs demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is superior in accuracy and recall,furthermore solving the sparsity problem.

Textual-geographical-social aware point-of-interest recommendation

The rapid development of location-based social networks（LBSNs） has provided an unprecedented opportunity for better location-based services through point-of-interest（POI） recommendation. POI recommendation is personalized, location-aware, and context depended. However, extreme sparsity of user-POI matrix creates a severe challenge. In this paper we propose a textual-geographical-social aware probabilistic matrix factorization method for POI recommendation. Our model is textual-geographical-social aware probabilistic matrix factorization called TGS-PMF, it exploits textual information, geographical information, social information, and incorporates these factors effectively. First, we exploit an aggregated latent Dirichlet allocation（LDA） model to learn the interest topics of users and infer the interest POIs by mining textual information associated with POIs and generate interest relevance score. Second, we propose a kernel estimation method with an adaptive bandwidth to model the geographical correlations and generate geographical relevance score. Third, we build social relevance through the power-law distribution of user social relations to generate social relevance score. Then, our exploit probabilistic matrix factorization model（PMF） to integrate the interest, geographical, social relevance scores for POI recommendation. Finally, we implement experiments on a real LBSN check-in dataset. Experimental results show that TGS-PMF achieves significantly superior recommendation quality compared to other state-of-the-art POI recommendation techniques.