CAPS: Context Aware Personalized POI Sequence Recommender System
This addresses the need for personalized and coherent POI sequences in location-based social networks, such as for itinerary planning, but it is incremental as it builds on existing RNN methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating contextually coherent sequences of points-of-interest (POIs) for users, rather than single or arbitrary lists, by proposing CAPS, a model that extends RNNs and LSTMs to incorporate multiple contexts and global features, achieving improved performance on two real-world datasets.
The revolution of World Wide Web (WWW) and smart-phone technologies have been the key-factor behind remarkable success of social networks. With the ease of availability of check-in data, the location-based social networks (LBSN) (e.g., Facebook1, etc.) have been heavily explored in the past decade for Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation. Though many POI recommenders have been defined, most of them have focused on recommending a single location or an arbitrary list that is not contextually coherent. It has been cumbersome to rely on such systems when one needs a contextually coherent list of locations, that can be used for various day-to-day activities, for e.g., itinerary planning. This paper proposes a model termed as CAPS (Context-Aware Personalized POI Sequence Recommender System) that generates contextually coherent POI sequences relevant to user preferences. To the best of our knowledge, CAPS is the first attempt to formulate the contextual POI sequence modeling by extending Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and its variants. CAPS extends RNN by incorporating multiple contexts to the hidden layer and by incorporating global context (sequence features) to the hidden layers and the output layer. It extends the variants of RNN (e.g., Long-short term memory (LSTM)) by incorporating multiple contexts and global features in the gate update relations. The major contributions of this paper are: (i) it models the contextual POI sequence problem by incorporating personalized user preferences through multiple constraints (e.g., categorical, social, temporal, etc.), (ii) it extends RNN to incorporate the contexts of individual item and that of the whole sequence. It also extends the gated functionality of variants of RNN to incorporate the multiple contexts, and (iii) it evaluates the proposed models against two real-world data sets.