Cross-Regional Friendship Inference via Category-Aware Multi-Bipartite Graph Embedding

This paper proposes a novel problem of cross-regional friendship inference to solve the geographically restricted friends recommendation. Traditional approaches rely on a fundamental assumption that friends tend to be co-location, which is unrealistic for inferring friendship across regions. By reviewing a large-scale Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) dataset, we spot that cross-regional users are more likely to form a friendship when their mobility neighbors are of high similarity. To this end, we propose Category-Aware Multi-Bipartite Graph Embedding (CMGE for short) for cross-regional friendship inference. We first utilize multi-bipartite graph embedding to capture users’ Point of Interest (POI) neighbor similarity and activity category similarity simultaneously, then the contributions of each POI and category are learned by a category-aware heterogeneous graph attention network. Experiments on the real-world LBSNs datasets demonstrate that CMGE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.