Abstract:
Location-based recommender systems (LBRSs) have exhibited significant potential in providing personalized recommendations for users. As a result, users' visits to their favorite places may contribute to an increase in profits for service providers. The owners of various location recommendation applications also benefit from placing advertisements. However, several challenges (such as data sparsity, the cold-start problem, and tedium problem) need to be addressed to develop more effective LBRSs. In this paper, we propose a novel POI recommendation system, called LACF-Rec3, which employs a hybrid approach of link analysis (HITS-3) and collaborative filtering (CF-3) based on three visiting behaviors: frequency, variety, and repetition. Our method considers two user types for creating a list of recommended places. For cold-start users, HITS-3 identifies distinctive POIs based on user- and POI-visit patterns, ranks them accordingly, and recommends them to cold-start users. For existing users, CF-3 utilizes collaborative filtering based on their previous check-in history and POI distinctive aspects. Our experimental results conducted on a Foursquare dataset demonstrate that LACF-Rec3 outperforms prior methods in terms of recommendation accuracy, ranking precision, and matching ratio.