Next and next new POI recommendation via latent behavior pattern inference

Next and next new point-of-interest (POI) recommendation are essential instruments in promoting customer experiences and business operations related to locations. However, due to the sparsity of the check-in records, they still remain insufficiently studied. In this article, we propose to utilize personalized latent behavior patterns learned from contextual features, e.g., time of day, day of week, and location category, to improve the effectiveness of the recommendations. Two variations of models are developed, including GPDM, which learns a fixed pattern distribution for all users; and PPDM, which learns personalized pattern distribution for each user. In both models, a soft-max function is applied to integrate the personalized Markov chain with the latent patterns, and a sequential Bayesian Personalized Ranking (S-BPR) is applied as the optimization criterion. Then, Expectation Maximization (EM) is in charge of finding optimized model parameters. Extensive experiments on three large-scale commonly adopted real-world LBSN data sets prove that the inclusion of location category and latent patterns helps to boost the performance of POI recommendations. Specifically, ourmodels in general significantly outperform other state-of-the-artmethods for both next and next new POI recommendation tasks. Moreover, our models are capable of making accurate recommendations regardless of the short/long duration or distance.