Capturing Dynamic Interests of Similar Users for POI Recommendation Using Self-Attention Mechanism

The integration of location-based social networks and POI recommendation systems has the potential to enhance the urban experience by facilitating the exploration of new and relevant locales. The deployment of graph neural networks (GNNs) drives the development of POI recommendations, but this approach also brings with it the challenge of over-smoothing, where information propagation between nodes in the graph can lead to an excessive homogenization of the data. In prior works that utilized GNNs for POI recommendation, the bipartite graphs constructed from users and POIs as nodes failed to incorporate temporal dynamics, limiting the scope of the analysis to only spatial structure information. To circumvent this issue, the incorporation of a temporal component can be introduced during the aggregation process of graph convolution. In light of these considerations, the present study proposes a novel regionalized temporal GCN (RST-GCN) recommendation model that leverages self-attention mechanism to capture various levels of temporal information to better reflect the dynamic changes of time. By combining the graph’s spatial structure with geospatial features, similar users are distributed into distinct regional subgraphs, effectively avoiding the influence of non-similar users. The efficacy of the proposed model has been demonstrated through empirical evaluations conducted on two real-world datasets.