Ads and the city: considering geographic distance goes a long way

Social-networking sites have started to offer tools that suggest "guests" who should be invited to user-defined social events (e.g., birthday parties, networking events). The problem of how to recommend people to events is similar to the more traditional (recommender system) problem of how to recommend events (items) to people (users). Yet, upon Foursquare data of "who visits what" in the city of London, we show that a state-of-the-art recommender system does not perform well -mainly because of data sparsity. To fix this problem, we add domain knowledge to the recommendation process. From the complex system literature in human mobility, we learn two insights: 1) there are special individuals (often called power users) who visit many places; and 2) individuals go to a venue not only because they like it but also because they are close-by. We model these insights into two simple models and learn that: 1) simply recommending power users works better than random but is far from producing the best recommendations; 2) an item-based recommender system produces accurate recommendations; and 3) recommending places that are closest to a user's geographic center of interest produces recommendations that are as accurate as, if not more accurate than, item-based recommender's. This last result has practical implications as it offers guidelines for designing location-based recommender systems and for partly addressing cold-start situations.