Efficient Point-of-Interest Recommendation Services With Heterogenous Hypergraph Embedding

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation service has drawn growing attention with the widespread popularity of location- based social networks (LBSNs). Recent research methods on POI recommendation based on graph embedding have mainly focused on explicit interactions of LBSN objects such as user's check-ins on POIs and social relationships, while neglecting implicit relationship that cannot be directly observed but may notably contribute to the POI recommendation. This paper presents VirHpoi, a heterogeneous hypergraph embedding method for POI recommendation in LBSNs with three original contributions. First, we model the LBSNs as a hypergraph to capture the complex interactions in LBSNs and learn the hypergraph by preserving homophily and interaction attribute affinity of the LBSNs. Second, we introduce the notion of “virtual hyperedges” to capture the intrinsic correlations of POIs. Virtual hyperedges incorporate implicit yet informative connections of the check-in patterns in LBSNs in terms of geographical and semantic characteristics. Third, we propose techniques to learn heterogenous hypergraph embedding on the complex LBSN graph with both homogenous edges and heterogenous hyperedges with dual objectives: we aim to preserve the homophily of objects intra domain by maximizing the co-occurrence probability of all homogenous edges, and we want to learn the interaction attribute affinity across domains by maximizing the probability of predicting the target object in the hyperedges. As a result, our approach can preserve both the intra domain homophily of objects and the interaction attribute affinity across domains by learning low-dimensional embeddings of LBSN objects and then make more effective recommendations based on the embeddings. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show the effectiveness and superiority of VirHpoi compared with the state-of-the-art methods.