A BiLSTM-attention-based point-of-interest recommendation algorithm

Abstract Aiming at the problem that users’ check-in interest preferences in social networks have complex time dependences, which leads to inaccurate point-of-interest (POI) recommendations, a location-based POI recommendation model using deep learning for social network big data is proposed. First, the original data are fed into an embedding layer of the model for dense vector representation and to obtain the user’s check-in sequence (UCS) and space-time interval information. Then, the UCS and spatiotemporal interval information are sent into a bidirectional long-term memory model for detailed analysis, where the UCS and location sequence representation are updated using a self-attention mechanism. Finally, candidate POIs are compared with the user’s preferences, and a POI sequence with three consecutive recommended locations is generated. The experimental analysis shows that the model performs best when the Huber loss function is used and the number of training iterations is set to 200. In the Foursquare dataset, Recall@20 and NDCG@20 reach 0.418 and 0.143, and in the Gowalla dataset, the corresponding values are 0.387 and 0.148.