Dynamic Personalized POI Sequence Recommendation with Fine-Grained Contexts

Abstract

The Point Of Interest (POI) sequence recommendation is the key task in itinerary and travel route planning. Existing works usually consider the temporal and spatial factors in travel planning. However, the external environment, such as the weather, is usually overlooked. In fact, the weather is an important factor because it can affect a user’s check-in behaviors. Furthermore, most of the existing research is based on a static environment for POI sequence recommendation. While the external environment (e.g., the weather) may change during travel, it is difficult for existing works to adjust the POI sequence in time. What’s more, people usually prefer the attractive routes when traveling. To address these issues, we first conduct comprehensive data analysis on two real-world check-in datasets to study the effects of weather and time, as well as the features of the POI sequence. Based on this, we propose a model of Dynamic Personalized POI Sequence Recommendation with fine-grained contexts (DPSR for short). It extracts user interest and POI popularity with fine-grained contexts and captures the attractiveness of the POI sequence. Next, we apply the Monte Carlo Tree Search model (MCTS for short) to simulate the process of recommending POI sequence in the dynamic environment, i.e., the weather and time change after visiting a POI. What’s more, we consider different speeds to reflect the fact that people may take different transportation to transfer between POIs. To validate the efficacy of DPSR, we conduct extensive experiments. The results show that our model can improve the accuracy of the recommendation significantly. Furthermore, it can better meet user preferences and enhance experiences.