Incorporating Spatial, Temporal, and Social Context in Recommendations for Location-Based Social Networks

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) such as Foursquare, Brightkite, and Gowalla are a growing area where recommendation algorithms find a practical application. With an ever-increasing variety of venues to choose from deciding on a destination can be overwhelming. Recommenders aid their users in the decision-making process by providing a list of locations likely to be relevant to the user's needs and interests. Traditional collaborative filtering algorithms consider relationships between users and locations, finding users to be similar only if their location histories overlap. However, the availability of spatial, temporal, and social information in an LBSN offers an opportunity to improve the quality of a recommendation engine. Social network data allows us to connect users who can directly influence each other's decisions. Temporal data allows us to account for the drifting preferences of users, giving more weight to recent location visits over historical selections, and taking advantages of repetitive behaviors. Spatial information allows us to focus recommendations on locations close to the user, keeping our recommendations relevant as a user travels. We introduce a novel approach to incorporate spatial, temporal, and social context into a traditional collaborative filtering algorithm. We evaluate our method on data sets collected from three LBSNs, and demonstrate that our approach is at the least competitive with existing state-of-the-art location recommenders.