Temporal interval refinement for point-of-interest recommendation

Abstract

Point-of-Interest(POI) recommendation systems suggest the most interesting POIs to users considering the current location and time. With the rapid development of smartphones, internet-of-things, and location-based social networks, it has become feasible to accumulate huge amounts of user POI visits. Therefore, instant recommendation of interesting POIs at a given time is being widely recognized as important. To increase the performance of POI recommendation systems, several studies extracting users’ POI sequential preference from POI check-in data, which is intended for implicit feedback, have been suggested. However, when constructing a model utilizing sequential preference, the model encounters possibility of data distortion because of a low number of observed check-ins which is attributed to intensified data sparsity. This thesis suggests refinement of temporal intervals based on data confidence. When building a POI recommendation system using temporal intervals to model the POI sequential preference of users, our methodology reduces potential data distortion in the dataset and thus increases the performance of the recommendation system. We verify our model’s effectiveness through the evaluation with three active check-in datasets and one passive check-in dataset.