Analysis of Point-of-Interest Recommendation Systems

1.

OVERVIEW

Recommendation Systems provides users information about

items of potential interest. These systems match the users
to item based on factors like geographical location, historical
data, and demographic data. Taking into consideration the
geographical location of the user, location based social networks (LBSN) has been evolving rapidly. With this system
users establish social links with other users and the check-in
data of these users are used to recommend Point-of-Interests
(POI). Using historical data the users role as reviewer is also
used towards recommending POIs. POI has become increasingly important and various recommendation systems have
been researched. In every research work there has been different dimensions to the system, and in this paper we will
concentrate on three aspects namely:
1. Sparsity of user-POI matrix for out-of-station recommendation[4]
2. Opinion based recommendation (ORec) using supervised aspect dependency[6] and
3. Analyzing the dual roles of users (DualRec) i.e. a
reviewer role and rater role for the reviews[3].
In each of the above categories, they unanimously use two
fundamental principles, Collaborative Filtering and Polarity
Detection. Polarity Detection classifies the given text as
positive, negative or neutral to detect the overall attitude of
the user towards the POI. Polarity Detection is run on user
reviews or tip. Collaborative Filtering is basically taking
into consideration the text based reviews Polarity and also
users social links and collaborating them to find the social
ratings of any item or restaurant.
This paper highlights the common themes of the named
three research work, which was presented in the CIKM conference, 2015. To truly understand the theories mentioned,
analysis and evaluation of the discordant themes and nonoverlapping concepts is additionally validated.

2.

COMMON THEMES
The three papers presented in the conference, work to-

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wards achieving a perfect model to recommend POI to users

based on reviews/tips or rating of the reviews. Each paper
has its way of predicting the POI but the there are four primary factors that affect the recommendation for each user.
To quantify the similarity of different users POI and to evaluate the sentiment of the reviews, the three papers unanimously use Collaborative Filtering and Polarity Detection
or Sentimental Analysis respectively.
We will first look at the four factors that need to be kept
in mind while developing a model, as these affect the recommendations of a POI to a user. First is the Content Factor,
which is the set of words that describe a POI, it is based on
this the users interest and POI is matched. Second is the
Temporal effect[5], the time at which the user has visited a
POI. Using this information POI is recommended as per the
time of query. Third is the Geographical influence, this is
by far the most important factor as POI is recommended as
per the location of the user. Any POI recommended should
be in the vicinity of the users location, thus POI and users
location have to be matched. Fourth is the Word-of-Mouth
effect; this also plays a vital role in recommendation systems
because if a user is new to a location, the users social circle
or local word-of-mouth about the POI influences the users
taste.
For any recommendation system, to find user-user similarity or item-item similarity, the state-of-the-art technique to
infer the preference is Collaborative Filtering. Suppose we
have a user X whose preference is similar, i.e., with the same
taste, to neighbourhood set of users U, we can predict if a
particular POI is of interest to X by comparing it with U.
This notion of similarity is done by using Jaccard similarity
or Centered Cosine similarity. Centered Cosine similarity
is largely used as it considers a users missing rating vector
as average rating and this helps in handling tough and easy
raters.
To analyse the polarity of the reviews by a user, we use
Polarity Detection. This helps in quantifying the users attitude towards a POI. The polarities are classified as positive,
negative and neutral. This can be done using various sentimental analysis tools, one of which is SentiNet. In all the
three research works polarity detection is done by contentbased approach. Using this we can clearly know the users
likes and dislikes, which essentially helps us in developing
an accurate and optimised recommendation system.
In the paper published by H. Yin, X. Zhou, Y. Shao, H.
Wang, and S. Sadiq. the joint probabilistic model for recommendation takes into consideration all the four factors. This
is done my taking two factors at a time and training the

sample with numerous iterations and finding the close proximity of a users preference. Whereas in the work published
by J.-D. Zhang, C.-Y. Chow and Y. Zheng the content, geographical and word-of-mouth factors are considered. The
model built mail concentrates on the textual information of
the user and the POI. The last paper by S. Wang, J. Tang,
and H. Liu also contemplates on the content factor, placing
more importance on the reviews polarity and fusing it with
users rating on items.
The work from all three are primarily based on the comparison of a querying users preference with other users in social links or in the site. The opinion of each user is weighted
using the polarity detection. Each user profile is deduced
and then collaborative filtering is used to match the corresponding users matrix and an appropriate POI is recommended. Even though each model is dissimilar in the way
of choosing the distribution and assigning the ranks for each
POI, the common theme remains the same.
For example given a user X, his/her previous reviews and
check-in information is used to build the users profile matrix. The restaurant or POI checked-in also will have its tag
words describing the POI. The querying user X is compared
with the POIs tagged words and also how the other users in
the site have reviewed the POI is matched. The algorithms
are measured to find the efficiency and if the calculations are
based offline or online. The second paradigm is important
as the time taken to process the recommendation system
affects the efficiency of the chosen predictive model.

3.

DISCORDANT THEMES

Papers submitted in the conference deal with different

challenges that are present in real-time environment. Of the
3 models, JIM model concentrates on all the four factors
i.e., content effect, temporal effect , geographical influence
and word-of-mouth effect, whereas the other two, depending on the problem at hand, have given less weightage to
certain factors. In ORec and DualRec systems the authors
have not taken into consideration the temporal effect. While
fusing the probability data, each model have used different
distributions and the cross product of each matrix or vector
vary.
Other than the fact that each model is different in weighing the data variables, the way the polarity of a review/tip
is measured also differs. In ORec model while creating the
user profile matrix, the aspect-opinion pair is formulated differently. To handle conditions like taste is not bad, usual
recommendation systems would give the polarity as negative
due to the word bad, whereas the polarity here is neutral.
ORec model handles these terms cleverly whereas the other
models lack this.
Additionally the JIM model has a unique way of handling
out-of-town recommendation , as the data sparsity for POIs
in out-of-town are scarce. In JIM model the algorithms used
are specific if the recommendation is an out-of-town one,
whereas in DualRec the data sparsity problem is handled
in a more generalized way. No specific path is provided for
overcoming the challenge.

4.

NON-OVERLAPPING THEMES

As mentioned earlier each model in the papers published

in the conference is unique and in each paper the factor
weightage is different, which ultimately affects the efficient.

4.1

Joint probabilistic generative model JIM

The work published by H. Yin, X. Zhou, Y. Shao, H.

Wang, and S. Sadiq solves the user-POI data-sparsity problem when the system has to recommend POI for out-of-town
region. A user in a new city would more likely visit places
which he/she have never visited. For these recommendations due to the data sparsity and no proper joint modelling of the the four factors, the earlier recommendation
systems are less efficient. To overcome this issue, the authors have formulated a Joint probabilistic generative model
JIM, which bridges the gap to deal with data sparsity especially for out-of-toe users. It takes into consideration all the
factors namely content, temporal, geographical and wordof-mouth effect.
In this model, a POI has two attributes which is semantic and geographical And corresponding to these two attributes JIM model has Time-aware User Interest Component (TIC) [5] and Popularity-aware User Mobility Component (PMC). In TIC, user-POIs temporal factor is exploited
i.e., a checked-in users interest is studied and as per the
time at which the query is made a POI is recommended.
On the other hand the PMC accounts for the remaining
two factors; geographical influence and word-of-mouth effect. In this component the users activity range and as per
the geographical tag a POI recommended. With this the
word-of-mouth effect is integrated through the wisdom of
the crowds.
The applicability of the JIM model is done by unifying
two ways namely 1) home-town recommendation and 2) outof-town recommendation. Both the types of recommendation systems must adhere to the users personalized time
aware and location based information. Similarly both the
recommendation systems have 3 major definitions which are
POI, user home location, users check in activity, user profile,
POIs topic which is a collection of words used for describing
in general a threshold distance d is used to measure whether
a home town recommendation or out of town recommendation system has to be used. This is done by calculating the
distance between the users current location and his or her
home location. If the distance calculated is greater than D
then out of town recommendation system is placed.
Both the algorithms are run through sufficient number of
sampling iterations and an approximate probable POI list is
generated. For an efficient on line recommendation ranking
system namely top-K highest ranked POI, is recommended
to the targeted user to demonstrate the applicability and efficiency of JIM model extensive experiments were performed
by the authors.
Two large scale data sets were Foursquare and twitter
were used to present the effectiveness of recommendation
methods as well tuned parameters. The presented JIM model
showed superiority over earlier state of the art techniques.
JIM model takes into consideration the temporal effect for
home town recommendation and content effect for an out of
town recommendation.

4.2

Opinion-based POI Recommendation framework (ORec)

In many POI recommendation systems, the users historical data about the check-in frequency is taken into consideration. However the authors of this paper have put forth
two facts that arguably questions the earlier observations.
Firstly in real-time users do not check-in to the same POI

and secondly if a user does check-in several times an inference that the POI is highly rated should not be derived.
The latter is explained further that due to the users home
or office location a user may forced to visit the same POI.
Thus the authors have presented that the content factor of
the user reviews plays the most vital role in recommendation
systems.
The ORec model includes two main parts: polarity detection[2] and POI recommendation. Polarity detection is used
to detect whether the user review/tip is positive, neutral or
negative. For deriving the attitude of the user towards the
POI the Polarity detection is further split into three phases.
First is Opinion Phase extraction, wherein the aspect (for
example, taste, ambience) is extracted and then the opinion is processed (for example, bad, good, high). The
second phase is Aspect Clustering, the distance between the
different aspects is determined. As every Aspect feature in
a user profile must be unique, the overall opinion about a
single aspect is calculated. The final phase is to detect the
polarity using Bayesian classifier.
The second part is the POI recommendation which is also
divided into three phases. First phase is to fuse the polarity
tips with the users social links to find similarity of other
users taste. Secondly the polarity tips are fused with the
geographical information of the POI and user. Thirdly the
social-geographical influences are calculated as per the robust product rule to determine the probability of the user
to a POI.

4.3

Dual Roles of Users

In real world recommendation system, a user can play two

roles namely a reviewer and a rater. The rating of a review
by a user helps in indirectly determining a new users opinion towards the review of an item by another user. Thus the
other investigates the dual roles of users by proposing a recommender system called DualRec. DualRec recommender
system is summarized as 1) calculating mathematically a
particular way to capture the rater role 2) building a recommender system dualrec which cohesively interacts with the
users reviewer and rater roles.
Firstly using collaborative filtering[1] the author chooses
a matrix factorization to exploit a reviewer role to users.
Collaborative filtering being an infamous method to build a
recommender system is used to match user and items in a
K dimensional matrix. The rater role of users indicate the
helpfulness of a review about an item, thus the implicit item
rating must be captured mathematically using a helpfulness
rating matrix. For every user-item pair a review matrix and
a rater matrix is formulated.
Using dirichlet multinomial distribution of variables an
optimized method for DUALREC is formulated. Based on
collaborating method an alternating least squares method is
fixated on the reviewer and rater matrix. DUALREC models effectiveness is validated against two problems, i.e., cold
start problem and the performance affected by incorporating the rater role of users. For evaluating a performance two
widely used rating prediction metrics are adopted namely,
Mean Absolute Error and Route Mean Square Error. After
incorporating a matrix system on two large data sets, the
improvement in performance increases by 10
DUALREC was also found to handle cold start users, i.e.,
an item newly added with no reviews or ratings must still be
robustly used as a POI. Thus the DUALREC exploits the

context of reviews, social networks and helpfulness ratings

and ultimately increases reliability of the proposed POI list.

5.

FINAL REMARKS

Recommender systems have revolutionized the way people find products, restaurants and even other people. The
three research papers presented in CIKM conference, 2015
dwells greatly on different predictive recommendation system. Though a lot of research has been conducted earlier on
recommendation system the three new models proposed by
the authors show a great deal of progress in data sciences.
In this paper many vital points have been deliberated and
evaluated on real time data sets. Even though the primary
factors, principles, filtering techniques and sentimental analysis are common grounds for the three POI recommendation
systems, the weightage of each variables are distributed over
different strategies. Each strategy has not only been tested
but proven to be efficient. The usage of temporal effect in a
recommendation model has carved a new meaning for recommendation systems.
Although these variations in recommendation systems have
come a long way, mining of huge data from the POI recommendation sites would always need more effective and practical algorithms. There are several interesting directions and
paradigms that would need further investigations. For example, recent data not only include textual information but
also include EMOTICONS, GIF images etc. Prediction using these data would change the face of POI recommendation systems.

6.

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