NEXT: a neural network framework for next POI recommendation

AbstractThe task ofnext POI recommendations has been studied extensively in recent years. However, developing a unified recommendation framework to incorporate multiple factors associated with both POIs and users remains challenging, because of the heterogeneity nature of these information. Further, effective mechanisms to smoothly handle cold-start cases are also a difficult topic. Inspired by the recent success of neural networks in many areas, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective neural network framework, named NEXT, for next POI recommendations. NEXT is a unified framework to learn the hidden intent regarding user ’s next move, by incorporating different factors in a unified manner. Specifically, in NEXT, we incorporate meta-data information, e.g., user friendship and textual descriptions of POIs, and two kinds of temporal contexts (i.e., time interval and visit time). To leverage sequential relations and g eographical influence, we propose to adopt DeepWalk, a network representation learning technique, to encode such knowledge. We evaluate the effectiveness of NEXT against other state-of-the-art alternatives and neural networks based solutions. Experimental results on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that NEXT significantly outperforms baselines in real-time next POI recommendations. Further experiments show inherent ability of NEXT in handling cold-start.
Source: European Journal of Applied Physiology - Category: Physiology Source Type: research