Zone-Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Representation Learning for Urban POI Recommendation

Points-of-interest (POIs) recommendation plays a vital role in location-based social networks (LBSNs) by introducing unexplored POIs to consumers and has drawn extensive attention from academia and industry. Existing POI recommender systems usually learn fixed latent vectors to represent both consumers and POIs from historical check-ins and make recommendations under the spatio-temporal constraints. However, we argue that the existing works still suffer from the challenges of explaining consumers’ complicated check-in actions. To this end, we first explore the interpretability of recommendations from the POI aspect, i.e., for a specific POI, its function usually changes over time, so representing a POI with a single fixed latent vector is not sufficient to describe the dynamic nature of POIs. Besides, check-in actions to a POI are also affected by the zone where it is located. In other words, the zone's embedding learned from POI distributions, road segments, and historical check-ins could be jointly utilized to enhance POI embeddings. Along this line, we propose a
T
ime-z
o
ne-space
P
OI embedding model (
ToP
), which integrates multi-knowledge graphs and topic model to introduce not only spatio-temporal effects but also sentiment constraints into POI embeddings for strengthening interpretability of recommendation. Specifically, ToP learns multiple latent vectors for a POI in a different period with spatial constraints via knowledge graph learning. To add sentiment constraints, ToP jointly combines these vectors with the zone's representations learned by topic models to make explainable recommendations. ToP considers the time, space, and sentiment of POI in a unified embedding framework, which benefits the POI recommendations. Extensive experiments on real-world Changchun city datasets demonstrate that ToP achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of common metrics and provides more insights for consumers’ POI check-in actions.