GeoTeCS: Exploiting Geographical,

Temporal, Categorical and Social

aspects for Personalized POI
Recommendation

Ramesh Baral*, Dingding Wang+, Tao Li*,

Shu-Ching Chen*

February 10, 2018

 Location Based Social Network (LBSN)

[1] Bao, J., Zheng, Y., & Mokbel, M. F. (2012, November). Location-based and preference-aware recommendation using sparse geo-social networking data.
InProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (pp. 199-208). ACM.
[2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/lbsn/
 Introduction
• LBSN rating matrix => {user-check-ins} tuples
• Is rating/check-in frequency alone enough?
• Rating matrix often sparse => cold start
problem
• Need to focus beyond just the rating/check-in
frequency
• Can we utilize LBSN features?
 Introduction..
• LBSN has unique features
– Different aspects (time, location category, social
relation, location distance etc) associated with
LBSN
• Challenges for efficient prediction
– Social information not always reliable
– 96% of people share < 10% of the commonly
visited places and 87% of people share nothing at
all [1]
– Wise fusion of aspects is needed
• Integration of multiple aspects for efficient
recommendation can be effective
[1]
M. Ye, P. Yin, and W.-C. Lee, “Location recommendation for location-based social networks,” in Proceedings of the 18th
SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. ACM, 2010, pp. 458–461.
Motivation
 Motivation..
• Geographical
– Preference to closest location
• Temporal
– Temporal popularity of POI
– Temporal check-in trend of user
• Categorical
– Locations with same category can be an option
• Social
– Influence of Friends/Followers-Followee
 Related Research
• Yuan et al. [7] designed a model with the spatial
and the temporal aspect.
• Used the cosine similarity of check-in profiles.
• Defined the recommendation score for a user-
location tuple in terms of the aggregate of the
visits count on that location over all the users in
the dataset.
• Time constrained => same location and at the
same check-in time.
• No social and categorical aspect
 Related Research..
• Ye et al. [1] fused the social and the spatial
aspects
• Used the willingness factor and the weighted
cosine similarity measure to compare the user
profiles for the recommendation
• The categorical and the temporal aspects were
not explored in their proposed model
 Related Research..
• GeoMFTD [4] fused the spatial and the temporal
influence but still didn’t incorporate other major
aspects for the recommendation.
• For each POI i, used the average time spent by each
user to reach the POI j (j ε gl, where gl is the lth
geographical grid/region) from the POI i.
• Repeat for every user who had at least one check-in
at POI i and more recent one at the POI j into gl.
• Temporal aspect was incorporated by the temporal
coefficients to the POI influence.
 Methodology
• Matrix Factorization characterizes both items
and users by vectors of factors inferred from
the user-item rating matrix
• user factor matrix U =[u1; u2...; um]
• item factor matrix V= [v1; v2....; vn]
• the approximation of the rating matrix R can
be defined as: R~UTV and regularized as:
 Methodology..
• Map the user-location check-in frequency
matrix (R) into low dimension latent space:

• Regularized:

• Divide the check-in locations into L grids or

regions (gl such that L = {g1; g2; ….; gL })
• The two factor matrices, the users’ influence
and the POIs’ influence are incorporated into
the grids.
 Methodology..
• POI influence area = non-negative vector yεR+L
• The influence of the location i to the grid gl is
defined as:

– K(.) is the standard normal distribution

– σ is the standard deviation of the distance
between the locations in the grid
• Temporal and Categorical fusion:
 Methodology..
• Users’ influence
• The estimated density of a user u at a POI i
can be defined as:

– Pu is the set of locations visited by the user

– σ is the standard deviation of the distances
previously visited by the user
• Fusing social aspect:
 Methodology..
• The new optimization problem

• The new preference matrix

• Recommendation relation:
 Dataset[1] statistics
Attributes Gowalla Weeplaces

Check-ins 36,001,959 7,658,368

Users 319,063 15,799

Locations 2,844,076 971,309

Social links 337,545 59,970

(undirectional)
Location Categories 629 96

[1] X.
Liu, Y. Liu, K. Aberer, and C. Miao, “Personalized point-of-interest recommendation by mining users’ preference
transition,” in Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Conference on information & knowledge
management. ACM, 2013, pp. 733–738.
 Top 5 popular categories
Gowalla Weeplaces

Corporate Office (1,750,707) Home / Work / Other:

Corporate / Office (437,824)

Coffee Shop (1,063,961) Home / Work /

Other:Home (306,126)
Mall (958,285) Food:Coffee Shop (267,589)

Grocery (884,557) Nightlife:Bar (248,565)

Gas & Automotive (863,199) Shops:Food & Drink:Grocery

Supermarket (161,016)
Check-in trend with distance
 Evaluation parameters
• Used 5-fold cross-validation
• Used four cases, (i) top 5, (ii) top 10, (iii) top
15, and (iv) top 20 items with the highest
recommendation score
• Process was repeated with three sets of values
for α: β (0.25:0.75, 0.5:0.5, 0.75:0.25)
• Best result was achieved when the categorical
factor (α) was set to 0.25 and the temporal
factor (β) was set to 0.75
 Results (Weeplaces Dataset)
Models Precision Recall F-Score

Ye et al. [1] 0.02417 0.00095 0.00183

LBSNRank [2] 0.08496 0.00063 0.00125

Wang et al. [3] 0.01818 0.00052 0.00100

GeoMFTD [4] 0.09415 0.00676 0.01261

FMFMGM [5] 0.06549 0.00487 0.00906

GeoTecs 0.29800 0.01546 0.02939*

 Results (Gowalla Dataset)
Models Precision Recall F-Score

Ye et al. [1] 0.03000 0.00120 0.00230

LBSNRank [2] 0.40900 0.00300 0.00600

Wang et al. [3] 0.10600 0.00200 0.00392

GeoMFTD [4] 0.09900 0.01570 0.02710

FMFMGM [5] 0.07220 0.00800 0.01440

GeoTecs 0.38477 0.03410 0.06264*

 Results (Precision@N, Recall@N)

Models Precision@N Recall@N Models Precision@N Recall@N

Ye et al. [1] @5= 0.03030 @5= 0.00080 FMFMGM @5= 0.05900 @5= 0.00489
@10= 0.02300 @10= 0.00090 [5] @10= 0.06800 @10= 0.00687
@15= 0.01910 @15= 0.00100 @15= 0.08700 @15= 0.00873
LBSNRank @5= 0.08530 @5= 0.00060 GeoMFTD @5= 0.07719 @5= 0.00641
[2] @10= 0.08480 @10= 0.00060 [4] @10= 0.08947 @10= 0.00824
@15= 0.40900 @15= 0.00300 @15= 0.11578 @15= 0.00924
Wang et al. @5= 0.04490 @5= 0.00140 GeoTecs @5= 0.28400 @5= 0.00950
[3] @10= 0.04140 @10= 0.00207 @10= 0.36500 @10= 0.00920
@15= 0.04070 @15= 0.00220 @15= 0.38800 @15= 0.02770
 Conclusion and Future direction
• Fused the (a) the geographical/spatial, (b) the
categorical, (c) the temporal and (d) the social
aspects into a POI recommendation model
• Future direction:
– Fusion of other aspects
– Context-based location recommendation
 Acknowledgements
• The work was supported in part by the
National Science Foundation under grants
CNS-1126619, IIS-1213026, and CNS-1461926,
the U.S. Department of Homeland Securitys
VACCINE Center under Award Number 2009-
ST-061-CI0001, and a gift award from Huawei
Technologies Co.Ltd.
 References
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Proceedings of the 18th SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic
Information Systems. ACM, 2010, pp. 458–461.
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networks,” in Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. ACM, 2012, pp.
980–987.
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users’ preference transition,” in Proceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on
Conference on information & knowledge management. ACM, 2013, pp. 733–738.
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