FGCRec: Fine-Grained Geographical Characteristics Modeling for Point-of-Interest Recommendation

With the popularity of location-based social networks (LBSNs), Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has become an essential location-based service to help people explore novel locations. Although the massive check-in data bring a good opportunity, there are still many challenges in building personalized POI recommender systems based on geographical information. First, current coarse-grained geographical models provide considerably limited improvements on POI recommendations and fail to capture the overall impact of fine-grained geographical characteristics in LBSNs. Second, previous methods such as matrix factorization always give equal weight to each positive example and may not distinguish between their different contributions in learning the objective function. To cope with these challenges, we develop a fine-grained POI recommendation framework that makes full use of the geographical characteristics from both users’ and locations’ perspectives. For capturing the fine-grained geographical influence, we present a unified probability distribution model based on four key geographical characteristics. For mining more contribution information from positive examples, we assign a higher weight to highlight the contribution of a higher check-in frequency by employing a logistic matrix factorization. Finally, experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.