A Common Topic Transfer Learning Model for Crossing City POI Recommendations

With the popularity of location-aware devices (e.g., smart phones), large amounts of location-based social media data (i.e., user check-in data) are generated, which stimulate plenty of works on personalized point of interest (POI) recommendations using machine learning techniques. However, most of the existing works could not recommend POIs in a new city to a user where the user and his/her friends have never visited before. In this paper, we propose a common topic transfer learning graphical model–the common-topic transfer learning model (CTLM)–for crossing-city POI recommendations. The proposed model separates the city-specific topics (or features) of each city from the common topics (or features) shared by all cities, to enable the users’ real interests in the source city to be transferred to the target city. By doing so, the ill-matching problem between users and POIs from different cities can be well addressed by preventing the real interests of users from being influenced by the city-specific features. Furthermore, we incorporate the spatial influence into our proposed model by introducing the regions’ accessibility. As a result, the co-occurrence patterns of users and POIs are modeled as the aggregated result from these factors. To evaluate the performance of the CTLM, we conduct extensive experiments on Foursquare and Twitter datasets, and the experimental results show the advantages of CTLM over the state-of-the-art methods for the crossing-city POI recommendations.