Urban point-of-interest recommendation by mining user check-in behaviors

In recent years, researches on recommendation of urban Points-Of-Interest (POI), such as restaurants, based on social information have attracted a lot of attention. Although a number of social-based recommendation techniques have been proposed in the literature, most of their concepts are only based on the individual or friends' check-in behaviors. It leads to that the recommended POIs list is usually constrained within the users' or friends' living area. Furthermore, since context-aware and environmental information changes quickly, especially in urban areas, how to extract appropriate features from such kind of heterogeneous data to facilitate the recommendation is also a critical and challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Urban POI-Mine (UPOI-Mine) that integrates location-based social networks (LBSNs) for recommending users urban POIs based on the user preferences and location properties simultaneously. The core idea of UPOI-Mine is to build a regression-tree-based predictor in the normalized check-in space, so as to support the prediction of interestingness of POI related to each user's preference. Based on the LBSN data, we extract the features of places in terms of i) Social Factor, ii) Individual Preference, and iii) POI Popularity for model building. To our best knowledge, this is the first work on urban POI recommendation that considers social factor, individual preference and POI popularity in LBSN data, simultaneously. Through comprehensive experimental evaluations on a real dataset from Gowalla, the proposed UPOI-Mine is shown to deliver excellent performance.