A Point-of-Interest Recommendation Method Using Location Similarity

POI recommendation aims to recommend places which users have not visited before. In this paper, we proposed a POI recommendation method using location similarity, which assumes that people may be interested in the places that are similar with the places that they have been to before. In order to calculate the similarity of locations, we proposed a novel method using time slots. Every two hours can be considered as a time slot. In other words, one day can be segmented into 12 time slots. For each location, the check-in times in each time slot can be collected. These check-in times can form a vector, which can be used to calculate the similarity of two locations. According to the similarity, the score of each unvisited locations can be calculated and sorted. Finally, the POI recommendation can be generated from the top-n unvisited locations. The experiment results show that the proposed method is effective.