Probabilistic Social Sequential Model for Tour Recommendation

The pervasive growth of location-based services such as Foursquare and Yelp has enabled researchers to incorpo- rate better personalization into recommendation models by leveraging the geo-temporal breadcrumbs left by a plethora of travelers. In this paper, we explore Travel path recommendation, which is one of the applications of intelligent urban navigation that aims in recommending sequence of point of interest (POIs) to tourists. Currently, travelers rely on a tedious and time-consuming process of searching the web, browsing through websites such as Trip Advisor, and reading travel blogs to compile an itinerary. On the other hand, people who do not plan ahead of their trip find it extremely difficult to do this in real-time since there are no automated systems that can provide personalized itinerary for travelers. To tackle this problem, we propose a tour recommendation model that uses a probabilistic generative framework to incorporate user's categorical preference, influence from their social circle, the dynamic travel transitions (or patterns) and the popularity of venues to recommend sequence of POIs for tourists. Through comprehensive experiments over a rich dataset of travel patterns from Foursquare, we show that our model is capable of outperforming the state-of-the-art probabilistic tour recommendation model by providing contextual and meaningful recommendation for travelers.