On Information Coverage for Location Category Based Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation becomes a valuable service in location-based social networks. Based on the norm that similar users are likely to have similar preference of POIs, the current recommendation techniques mainly focus on users’ preference to provide accurate recommendation results. This tends to generate a list of homogeneous POIs that are clustered into a narrow band of location categories (like food, museum, etc.) in a city. However, users are more interested to taste a wide range of flavors that are exposed in a global set of location categories in the city. In this paper, we formulate a new POI recommendation problem, namely top-K location category based POI recommendation, by introducing information coverage to encode the location categories of POIs in a city. The problem is NP-hard. We develop a greedy algorithm and further optimization to solve this challenging problem. The experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the utility of new POI recommendations and the superior performance of the proposed algorithms.