Learning Graph-based POI Embedding for Location-based Recommendation

With the rapid prevalence of smart mobile devices and the dramatic proliferation of location-based social networks (LBSNs), location-based recommendation has become an important means to help people discover attractive and interesting points of interest (POIs). However, extreme sparsity of user-POI matrix and cold-start issue create severe challenges, causing CF-based methods to degrade significantly in their recommendation performance. Moreover, location-based recommendation requires spatiotemporal context awareness and dynamic tracking of the user's latest preferences in a real-time manner. To address these challenges, we stand on recent advances in embedding learning techniques and propose a generic graph-based embedding model, called GE, in this paper. GE jointly captures the sequential effect, geographical influence, temporal cyclic effect and semantic effect in a unified way by embedding the four corresponding relational graphs (POI-POI, POI-Region, POI-Time and POI-Word) into a shared low dimensional space. Then, to support real-time recommendation, we develop a novel time-decay method to dynamically compute the user's latest preferences based on the embedding of his/her checked-in POIs learnt in the latent space. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of our model on two real large-scale datasets, and the experimental results show its superiority over other competitors, especially in recommending cold-start POIs. Besides, we study the contribution of each factor to improve location-based recommendation, and find that both sequential effect and temporal cyclic effect play more important roles in users' daily life than geographical influence and semantic effect.