Personalized Point-of-Interest Recommendation on Ranking with Poisson Factorization

The increasing prevalence of location-based social networks (LBSNs) poses a wonderful opportunity to build per-sonalized point-of-interest (POI) recommendations, which aim at recommending a top-N ranked list of POIs to users according to their preferences. Although previous studies on collaborative filtering are widely applied for POI recommendation, there are two significant challenges have not been solved perfectly. (1) These approaches cannot effectively and efficiently exploit unobserved feedback and are also unable to learn useful information from it. (2) How to seamlessly integrate multiple types of context information into these models is still under exploration. To cope with the aforementioned challenges, we develop a new Personalized pairwise Ranking Framework based on Poisson Factor factorization (PRFPF) that follows the assumption that users’ preferences for visited POIs are preferred over potential POIs, unvisited POIs are less preferred than potential POIs. The framework PRFPF is composed of two modules: candidate module and ranking module. Specifically, the candidate module is used to generate a series of potential POIs from unvisited POIs by incorporating multiple types of context information (e.g., social and geographical information). The ranking module learns the ultimate order of users’ preference by leveraging the potential POIs. Experimental results evaluated on two large-scale real-world datasets show that our framework outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of various metrics.