Learning Co-occurrence Patterns for Next Destination Recommendation

Next destination recommendation is a crucial research area for understanding human travel behavior. However, existing studies often overlook the problem of underfitting, which arises due to the limited regularity in users’ travel patterns. To tackle this issue, we leverage diverse co-occurrence patterns (CoPs) to discover potential user preferences. These patterns capture intersections with similar spatial and temporal characteristics in users’ travels. However, traditional graph neural network (GNN)-based approaches struggle to effectively handle complex spatial-temporal CoPs. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel framework called DHIN (Dynamic Heterogeneous Information Network). First, to address the problem of underfitting, DHIN constructs intricate CoPs by leveraging abundant features and connection relationships. Additionally, to solve the needs of cold-start users, DHIN generates potential connections by capturing dynamic urban hotspots based on global users’ travel trajectories. Moreover, to model dynamic heterogeneous information, DHIN utilizes a hierarchical attention mechanism and integrates a dynamic encoder. The mechanism integrates multi-level attention to learn informative embeddings from heterogeneous attributes and structures, while the dynamic encoder processes dynamic temporal information for updating node representations. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on real-world trajectory data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DHIN model.