STCAPLRS: A Spatial-Temporal Context-Aware Personalized Location Recommendation System

Newly emerging location-based social media network services (LBSMNS) provide valuable resources to understand users’ behaviors based on their location histories. The location-based behaviors of a user are generally influenced by both user intrinsic interest and the location preference, and moreover are spatial-temporal context dependent. In this article, we propose a spatial-temporal context-aware personalized location recommendation system (STCAPLRS), which offers a particular user a set of location items such as points of interest or venues (e.g., restaurants and shopping malls) within a geospatial range by considering personal interest, local preference, and spatial-temporal context influence. STCAPLRS can make accurate recommendation and facilitate people’s local visiting and new location exploration by exploiting the context information of user behavior, associations between users and location items, and the location and content information of location items. Specifically, STCAPLRS consists of two components: offline modeling and online recommendation. The core module of the offline modeling part is a context-aware regression mixture model that is designed to model the location-based user behaviors in LBSMNS to learn the interest of each individual user, the local preference of each individual location, and the context-aware influence factors. The online recommendation part takes a querying user along with the corresponding querying spatial-temporal context as input and automatically combines the learned interest of the querying user, the local preference of the querying location, and the context-aware influence factor to produce the top-k recommendations. We evaluate the performance of STCAPLRS on two real-world datasets: Dianping and Foursquare. The results demonstrate the superiority of STCAPLRS in recommending location items for users in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, the experimental analysis results also illustrate the excellent interpretability of STCAPLRS.