Context-Aware Point-of-Interest Recommendation Based on Similar User Clustering and Tensor Factorization

Abstract

The rapid development of big data technology and mobile intelligent devices has led to the development of location-based social networks (LBSNs). To understand users’ behavioral patterns and improve the accuracy of location-based services, point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has become an important task. In contrast to the general task of product recommendation, POI recommendation faces the problems of the sparsity and weak semantics of user check-in data. To address these issues, an increasing number of studies have improved the accuracy of POI recommendations by introducing contextual information such as geographical, temporal, textual, and social relations. However, the rich context also brings great challenges to POI recommendation, such as the low utilization rate of context information, difficulty in balancing the richness of contextual information, and the complexity of the recommendation matrix. Considering that similar users have more interest preferences in common than users generally have, the check-in information of similar users has greater reference meaning. Thus, we propose a personalized POI recommendation method named CULT-TF, which incorporates similar users’ contextual information into the tensor factorization model. First, we present a user activity model and a user similarity model, which integrate contextual information to calculate the user activity and similarity between users. According to user activity, the most representative active users are selected as user clustering centers, and then users are clustered based on user similarity into several similar user clusters (C). Next, we construct a third-order tensor (user-location-time matrix) for each user cluster by using user activity, POI popularity, and time slot popularity as the eigenvalues in the user (U), location (L), and time (T) dimensions, and the eigenvalue of each dimension is modeled by integrating contextual information of users’ check-in behavior at the user, location, and time levels. Similar user clustering reduces the number of users in tensor modeling, reducing the U dimension. To further reduce the complexity of the recommendation matrix, the reduction of the L dimension is achieved through ROI (region of interest) clustering, and the reduction of the T dimension is achieved through time slot encoding. Then, we use tensor factorization (TF) to obtain the recommendation results. Our method decreases the complexity of the tensor matrix and integrates rich contextual information on users’ check-in behavior. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive performance evaluation of CULT-TF using real-world LBSN datasets from Brightkite. The experimental results show that our proposed method performs much better than other recommendation methods in terms of precision and recall.