Shop-Type Recommendation Leveraging the Data from Social Media and Location-Based Services

It is an important yet challenging task for investors to determine the most suitable type of shop (e.g., restaurant, fashion) for a newly opened store. Traditional ways are predominantly field surveys and empirical estimation, which are not effective as they lack shop-related data. As social media and location-based services (LBS) are becoming more and more pervasive, user-generated data from these platforms are providing rich information not only about individual consumption experiences, but also about shop attributes. In this paper, we investigate the recommendation of shop types for a given location, by leveraging heterogeneous data that are mainly historical user preferences and location context from social media and LBS. Our goal is to select the most suitable shop type, seeking to maximize the number of customers served from a candidate set of types. We propose a novel bias learning matrix factorization method with feature fusion for shop popularity prediction. Features are defined and extracted from two perspectives: location, where features are closely related to location characteristics, and commercial, where features are about the relationships between shops in the neighborhood. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art solutions.