International Journal of Geographical Information

Science

ISSN: 1365-8816 (Print) 1362-3087 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tgis20

RecNet: a deep neural network for personalized

POI recommendation in location-based social
networks

Ruifeng Ding & Zhenzhong Chen

To cite this article: Ruifeng Ding & Zhenzhong Chen (2018): RecNet: a deep neural network
for personalized POI recommendation in location-based social networks, International Journal of
Geographical Information Science, DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2018.1447671

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2018.1447671

Published online: 02 Apr 2018.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2018.1447671

ARTICLE

RecNet: a deep neural network for personalized POI

recommendation in location-based social networks
Ruifeng Ding and Zhenzhong Chen
School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

How to exploit various features of users and points of interest (POIs) Received 11 June 2017
for accurate POI recommendation is important in location-based Accepted 27 February 2018
social networks (LBSNs). In this paper, a novel POI recommendation KEYWORDS
framework, named RecNet, is proposed, which is developed based POI recommendation;
on a deep neural network (DNN) to incorporate various features in location-based social
LBSNs and learn their joint influence on user behavior. More speci- networks; deep neural
fically, co-visiting, geographical and categorical influences in LBSNs network; feature embedding
are exploited to alleviate the data sparsity issue in POI recommen-
dation and are converted to feature vector representations of POIs
and users via feature embedding. Moreover, the embedded POIs
and users are fed into a DNN pairwise to adaptively learn high-order
interactions between features. Our method is evaluated on two
publicly available LBSNs datasets and experimental results show
that RecNet outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for POI
recommendation.

1. Introduction
Location-based social networks (LBSNs) are online communities in which users can share
their physical locations in the form of check-ins and search for target points of interest
(POIs). LBSNs, e.g. Foursquare1 and Yelp,2 are attracting our attention as they provide a
platform for us to explore preferred POIs. Therefore, personalized POI recommendation
is crucial in LBSNs. There is rich information of users and POIs in LBSNs, such as users’
check-in records, POIs’ locations and categories, which is helpful to model users’ perso-
nalized preferences. However, most existing methods for POI recommendation do not
take full advantage of rich information in LBSNs (Bao et al. 2015, Liu et al. 2017). In
addition, traditional collaborative filtering and matrix factorization (MF)-based methods
are not able to incorporate various features in LBSNs effectively as they only learn linear
or low-order interactions between features. So we aim at designing a general POI
recommendation framework, which is able to exploit various features in LBSNs effec-
tively and adaptively learn their joint influence on user check-in behavior for accurate
POI recommendation.
A severe challenge for personalized POI recommendation is the data sparsity issue
(Lian et al. 2014, Li et al. 2015, 2016). A user usually visits only a small number of POIs,
resulting in an extremely sparse user–POI matrix. In light of this issue, we propose to

CONTACT Zhenzhong Chen zzchen@whu.edu.cn

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 R. DING AND Z. CHEN

employ co-visiting pattern, geographical influence and categorical correlation in LBSNs

to alleviate the data sparsity issue. More specifically, we leverage users’ check-in records
in LBSNs to generate a co-visiting matrix for POIs firstly, in which the co-visiting counts
between POIs are recorded pairwise. We also construct a geographical proximity matrix
for POIs according to the distances between POIs and a categorical correlation matrix
based on the categories of POIs. A MF-based feature embedding technique is adopted
on these matrices to obtain vector representations of POIs and users.
In order to incorporate various features in LBSNs and to learn their high-order interac-
tions for accurate POI recommendation, we propose a novel POI recommendation frame-
work, named RecNet, which utilizes a deep neural network (DNN) to adaptively learn
users’ personalized preferences for POIs. DNNs have made a great success in recent years
as they are able to adaptively learn high-level features and their interactions from inputs
for a specific task (LeCun et al. 2015). In this paper, embedded POIs and users are fed into
a DNN pairwise as inputs. In the training phase, RecNet addresses the POI recommenda-
tion task as a binary classification, in which a user visiting a POI is a positive sample, and
predicts the likelihood that a user visits a POI. For inference, RecNet assigns a score to each
POI and the highest scoring POIs are presented to the user accordingly. Extensive experi-
ments are conducted on two publicly available LBSNs datasets and the results show that
RecNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods for POI recommendation.
To summarize, the contributions of our work are:

● An MF-based feature embedding method is introduced to model relationships

between features and obtain feature vector representations of users and POIs.
More specifically, co-visiting pattern, geographical influence and categorical corre-
lation in LBSNs are exploited to alleviate the data sparsity issue in POI recommen-
dation and converted to latent vector representations by MF.
● A DNN-based POI recommendation framework, named RecNet, is proposed in this
paper, which incorporates various features in LBSNs and learns their high-order
interactions by a deep neural network for personalized POI recommendation. To
our best knowledge, this is the first work that employs deep neural networks for
POI recommendation.

2. Related work
Personalized POI recommendation in LBSNs is important and has been extensively
investigated. Existing studies have exploited various influences on users’ check-in beha-
vior for accurate POI recommendation, such as geo-social connection, content informa-
tion, temporal context and sequential transition.

Geo-social connection
Ye et al. (2011) proposed a unified collaborative filtering framework for location recom-
mendation which linearly fuses user interest, along with the social and geographical
influences. Cheng et al. (2012) captured the geographical influence via modeling the
probability of a user’s check-in on a location and fused the geo-social connection into a
generalized MF framework. Lian et al. (2014) investigated the spatial clustering
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 3

phenomenon from the novel perspective of two-dimensional kernel density estimation

and presented a geographical MF model for personalized POI recommendation.

Content information
Some studies focus on the application of content information such as user comments
and POI categories in LBSNs for POI recommendation as well. Yin et al. (2013)
developed a novel location-content-aware probabilistic generative model that quan-
tifies and incorporates both local preference and item content information for spatial
item recommendation. Li et al. (2016) presented a unified POI recommendation
approach which exploits geographical, social and categorical associations between
users and POIs. Wang et al. (2017) proposed a new framework named Visual Content
Enhanced POI recommendation, which further incorporates visual contents for POI
recommendation.

Temporal context
Yuan et al. (2013) divided time into periodic time slots and made use of the periodic
temporal property in their collaborative filtering recommendation method. Li et al.
(2015) presented a new ranking-based geographical factorization method which exploits
both geographical and temporal contexts for POI recommendation. Xie et al. (2016)
jointly learned the representation of POIs, time slots, geographical regions and content
words by the graph-based embedding model and proposed a novel dynamic user
preference modeling method. Zhao et al. (2017) developed a unified time-aware POI
recommendation framework which incorporates both sequential and spatial-temporal
context influence by proposing a temporal embedding model and a geographically
hierarchical preference ranking model.

Sequential transition
Recently, sequential effects have been proved effective for modeling users’ successive
check-in behavior by recent studies. Cheng et al. (2013) first exploited the personalized
Markov chain in the check-in sequences and took users’ movement constraints into
account for successive POI recommendation. Feng et al. (2015) introduced the metric
embedding algorithm to model both user preference and sequential transition for next
new POI recommendation. Feng et al. (2017) also proposed a novel latent representation
model named POI2Vec which incorporates the geographical influence in the framework
of word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013) for both future visitor prediction and POI
recommendation.
However, most of these methods above are designed for particular recommendation
scenarios and do not take full advantage of rich information in LBSNs. So they may suffer
from the data sparsity issue in POI recommendation. In addition, existing methods are
not able to model the joint influence of various features on user behavior effectively as
most of them predict users’ preferences for POIs based on inner products of latent
vectors, which usually treat all features equally and ignore high-order interactions
between various features.
4 R. DING AND Z. CHEN

DNNs have achieved a great success in recent years for their abilities to learn high-
level features and interactions from inputs. Recent work has proved their effectiveness in
recommender systems as well. DNNs are utilized for YouTube video recommendation by
Covington et al. (2016). Cheng et al. (2016) presented a DNN-based recommendation
framework named Wide & Deep and evaluated it on Google Play for mobile app
recommendation. He et al. (2017) proposed a general framework which combines
both DNNs and MF for more accurate recommendation performance. As the application
of DNNs for personalized POI recommendation is not well investigated, we propose a
DNN-based POI recommendation framework in this paper, which is able to incorporate
various features in LBSNs and learn their joint influence on user behavior. To the best of
our knowledge, our work in this paper is the first that utilizes DNNs for personalized POI
recommendation in LBSNs.

3. Problem definition
In this section, we give the definition of the POI recommendation problem. For ease of
presentation, we list the key notations and data structures used in this paper in Table 1.
Definition 1 (POI). A POI is defined as a uniquely identified place (e.g. a park or a
restaurant).
In this paper, a POI has three attributes: identifier v, location lv and category cv .
Location lv is presented in terms of longitude and latitude coordinates. In addition, each
POI is assigned a category which is predefined by the specific LBSN platform such as
Foursquare, denoted as cv . Table 2 shows an example of a POI.

Table 1. Notations and data structures used in this paper.

Variable Interpretation
u; v The identifier of user u and POI v
U; V The set of users and POIs
Du ; Vu ; Vu
The set of check-ins, visited and sampled unvisited POIs of user u
lv ; cv The location and category of POI v
O The co-visiting matrix of POIs
G; C The geographical proximity and categorical correlation matrix of POIs
n; d The number of POIs and the dimension of latent vector
m The geographical distance threshold
Eo ; eo The co-visiting latent factor matrix and vector
Eg ; eg The geographical latent factor matrix and vector
Ec ; ec The categorical latent factor matrix and vector
ev ; eu The feature vector of POI v and user u
L The number of hidden layers
Wi ; bi ; hi The weight matrix, bias and output vector of the ith hidden layer
wo ; bo The weight vector and bias of the output layer
yuv ; ^yuv The label and predicted score for user u’s preference on POI v
s The number of sampled unvisited POIs for an observed check-in

Table 2. A POI and its attributes.

ID 0
Latitude 35.626
Longitude 139.175
Category Convenience Store
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 5

Definition 2 (Check-in). A check-in generated by a user is made up of a tuple (u, v)

which indicates user u visits POI v. Actually, users’ check-ins in LBSNs reveal their
preferences for POIs implicitly.
Definition 3 (User Profile). Notation U is used to denote the set of users in LBSNs. For
each user u 2 U, a user profile Du is created, which is a set of check-ins generated by user u.
In particular, notation Vu is used to denote the set of POIs which are visited by user u.
Definition 4 (Co-Visiting Matrix). In order to employ the co-visiting pattern in users’
check-in behavior, a co-visiting matrix O 2 N nn for POIs is defined, in which n is the
number of POIs. Each entry Ovv0 records the number of users who have visited both POI
v and v0 . In particular, the entry Ovv is set to the number of users who have visited POI v.
It is clear that O is a symmetric matrix and a high value of entry Ovv0 means that POI v
and v0 are usually visited together by users.
Definition 5 (Geographical Proximity Matrix). As users’ check-ins are usually related
to locations of POIs (Bao et al. 2015), a geographical proximity matrix G 2 N nn is
defined in this paper. Firstly, we introduce a distance threshold m. Then, the entry Gvv0
is set to 1 if the distance between POI v and v0 is smaller than m. Otherwise, the entry is
set to 0. In particular, the entry Gvv is set to 1.
Definition 6 (Categorical Correlation Matrix). A categorical correlation matrix C 2 N nn
is constructed to exploit categories of POIs in LBSNs. More specifically, the entry Cvv0 is set to 1
if POI v and v0 share the same category. Otherwise, the entry is set to 0. In particular, the entry
Cvv is set to 1 as a POI only has one category in this paper.
The three matrices above are defined to capture co-visiting pattern, geographical influence
and categorical correlation in LBSNs. As we aim to feed all futures into deep neural networks
to train the recommendation model, a MF-based feature embedding method is adopted on
these matrices to learn latent vector representations of features. After the MF, POIs are
represented by three latent factor matrices, denoted as Eo , Eg and Ec , which are corresponding
to their co-visiting, geographical and categorical features, respectively. The details of the MF-
based feature embedding method will be detailed in Section 4.1.
Problem 1 (Personalized POI Recommendation). Given a user u 2 U with all his/her
check-ins Du and a set of POIs V, we aim to recommend top-k new POIs that u would be
interested in.

4. RecNet for personalized POI recommendation

In this paper, we present a DNN-based POI recommendation framework, named RecNet, for
personalized POI recommendation, which takes embedded POIs and users as inputs,
addresses the POI recommendation task as a binary classification and assigns scores to POIs
for users as outputs. The details of RecNet will be introduced in the following subsections.

4.1. Feature embedding

In order to train DNNs, it is essential to obtain effective vector representations of
features in LBSNs so that these features are able to be exploited by DNNs in the
training phase. However, traditional one-hot representations of features are usually
very sparse when feature dimension is large and not able to represent relationships
between similar features. Feature embedding is a recent representation learning
6 R. DING AND Z. CHEN

technique which embeds high-dimensional features into a low-dimensional vector

space to obtain more effective vector representations of features (Covington et al.
2016, Liang et al. 2016). In this paper, we present a novel MF-based feature embed-
ding method to learn lantent vectors for co-visiting, geographical and categorical
features of POIs in LBSNs, which is able to embed relationships between similar
features and obtain better vector representations than one-hot encoding. Moreover,
latent vectors of various features are further concatenated and calculated to represent
POIs and users. The main steps of the MF-based feature embedding method for POI
recommendation are described as follows.
Step 1: Embedding Co-Visiting Pattern. Firstly, we leverage users’ check-ins in
LBSNs to generate the co-visiting matrix O for POIs, which is defined in Section 3.
Then, a MF is adopted on O to embed POIs’ co-visiting patterns into a latent space
with dimension d  n. d is a hyper parameter of the MF to perform dimension reduction
and its impact on recommendation performance will be investigated in our experiments.
The objective function for the MF is defined as follows:

min k O
Eo EoT k2F þλo k Eo k2F (1)

Eo

where Eo 2 R nd is a low-rank latent factor matrix of POIs and λo is the parameter of the
regularization term. k  kF denotes the Frobenius norm of a matrix. As the co-visiting
matrix O is symmetric, we employ a nonnegative symmetric MF (SymNMF) (Kuang et al.
2012) as Equation (1) to decompose O into a low-rank latent factor matrix and its
transpose, which can be seen as performing clustering on users’ co-visiting patterns to
reduce feature dimension and learn potential co-visiting relationships between POIs.
Projected gradient descent method is adopted to optimize the latent factor matrix Eo for
the MF.
After the MF, each row in Eo is a latent vector of a certain POI v for its co-visiting
pattern and we call it co-visiting latent vector of POI v, denoted as eov . The embedding of
co-visiting pattern exploits relationships between POIs based on users’ check-in beha-
vior, which is similar to collaborative-filtering-based recommendation methods.
Step 2: Embedding Geographical Influence. Previous studies (Lian et al. 2014, Li
et al. 2015, Pham et al. 2017) have shown that people tend to explore POIs near the ones
that they have visited before. In order to incorporate geographical influence in LBSNs,
we construct a geographical proximity matrix G according to the definition in Section 3.
Then, the same MF strategy is adopted on G to obtain the latent vector representations
of POIs for their geographical associations. The optimization target is given as follows:

min k G
Eg EgT k2F þλg k Eg k2F (2)

Eg

where Eg 2 R nd is a latent factor matrix of POIs for their geographical associations and
λg is the parameter of the regularization term. Each POI v in LBSNs is mapped as a latent
vector in Eg for its geographical feature, which is denoted as egv and called the geogra-
phical latent vector of POI v in this paper.
Step 3: Embedding Categorical Correlation. Similar to the embedding of geogra-
phical influence, we adopt the same MF on the categorical correlation matrix C, which is
defined in Section 3 as well. The optimization target is presented as follows:
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 7

min k C
Ec EcT k2F þλc k Ec k2F (3)

Ec

where Ec 2 R nd is a latent factor matrix of POIs for their categorical correlations and λc is
the parameter of the regularization term. Each POI v is mapped as a latent vector in Ec for its
category, which is denoted as ecv and called the categorical latent vector of POI v.
The three types of features above contain both collaborative and content informa-
tion of POIs and are converted to latent vectors by the MF-based feature embedding
method so that they can be further exploited to alleviate the data sparsity issue in
POI recommendation. The three feature matrices are no needed to be decomposed
frequently as the number of POIs in LBSNs is usually more steady than that of users. It
is also easy to exploit other features such as tags and comments in LBSNs if they are
available.
It is worth to mention that our proposed MF-based feature embedding method is
able to embed relationships between POIs in their latent vector representations effec-
tively. To demonstrate the advantage, we take the embedding of categorical correlation
as an example. Given POI v and v0 , the approximate formula for calculating the cosine
similarity between their categorical latent vectors ecv and ecv0 is derived as follows:
hecv ; ecv0 i
Simðecv ; ecv0 Þ ¼ (4)
k ecv kk ecv0 k

hecv ; ecv0 i
¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi (5)
hecv ; ecv ihecv0 ; ecv0 i

Cvv0
 pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ¼ Cvv0 (6)
Cvv Cv0 v0

where h; i means calculating the inner product of two vectors, k  k means calculating
the norm of a vector and C is the categorical correlation matrix defined in Section 3.
Equations (4) and (5) are the definitions of cosine similarity between two vectors. Since
latent vectors ecv and ecv0 are learned by MF, their inner products are approximately equal
to their corresponding entries in C when the approximation errors of the MF are small.
Thus, we can obtain the approximate formula by replacing their inner products in
Equation (5) with the corresponding entries in C. Since both Cvv and Cv0 v0 are set to 1,
the cosine similarity between ecv and ecv0 is approximately equal to Cvv0 . From the
approximate formula, we can see that POI v and v0 should have a high similarity if
they share the same category. The similarity between latent vectors is able to be further
exploited by our proposed DNN-based recommendation model to explore similar POIs
and users who share common interests for more accurate POI recommendation.
Step 4: POI Representation. Given a POI v in V, the feature vector representation of
v is calculated as follows:
2 o3
ev
6 eg 7
6 v7
ev ¼ 6 c 7 (7)
4 ev 5
8 R. DING AND Z. CHEN

where eov , egv and ecv are, respectively, the corresponding co-visiting, geographical and
categorical latent vectors of POI v. Equation (7) concatenates the three types of latent
vectors to represent a POI so that all features of the POI are included in the feature
vector.
Step 5: User Representation. Furthermore, the feature vector representation of a
user is obtained according to his/her visited POIs. Given a user u with a set of his/her
visited POIs Vu , the feature vector of user u is calculated as follows:
P
ev
eu ¼ v2Vu (8)
jVu j

where eu is the feature vector of user u and jVu j is the number of POIs u has visited. In
other words, the feature vector of user u is the mathematical expectation of feature
vectors of his/her visited POIs. In particular, if a user has no check-ins, his/her feature
vector is set to a zero vector.
After feature embedding, all the features of POIs and users are represented in the
form of feature vectors so that they are able to be exploited by RecNet.

4.2. Recommendation model

DNNs have had a tremendous success for classification tasks in recent years while there
are relatively few attempts in recommender systems. A considerable way for persona-
lized recommendation using DNNs is to transfer the problem into a term of classifica-
tion. As users’ check-ins in LBSNs are implicit feedbacks (Ye et al. 2011), we address the
personalized POI recommendation task as a binary classification, in which a user visiting
a POI is a positive sample, and propose a DNN-based POI recommendation framework,
named RecNet, in this paper. The general architecture of RecNet with feature embed-
ding is presented in Figure 1.
In this paper, RecNet has a typical three-level network architecture: an input layer, L
hidden layers and an output layer. More specifically, the recommendation model of
RecNet is defined as:
2 3
eu
h0 ¼ 4 ev 5
(9)
hi ¼ σðWi hi
1 þ bi Þ
^yuv ¼ σ0 ðwo hL þ bo Þ

where h0 denotes the input vector of the network, hi is the output vector of the ith
hidden layer and ^yuv is the predicted score for user–POI pair ðu; vÞ by the network. In the
DNN-based recommendation model, h0 concatenates feature vectors of users and POIs
pairwise as inputs of the network. Then, interactions of features are learned from the
input vector h0 by several fully connected hidden layers. The ith hidden layer models the
interactions between features by introducing a connection weight matrix Wi and a bias
vector bi . Activation function σðÞ further introduces nonlinearity into the hidden layers.
In this paper, we adopt Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) (Glorot et al. 2011, p. 315–323,
Krizhevsky et al. 2012) as activation function of the hidden layers, which is able to
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 9

Figure 1. The architecture of RecNet with feature embedding. Embedded users and POIs are fed into
RecNet pairwise to train the deep neural network.

accelerate the convergence and alleviate the vanishing gradient problem in DNNs. Since
there are much less high-order interactions between features than low-order interac-
tions, the number of neurons in hidden layers are designed to decrease with respect to
depth so that relatively more low-order interactions can be learned at the first hidden
layer and high-order interactions are further extracted from learned low-order interac-
tions by deeper hidden layers. At last, the Sigmoid function σ0 ðxÞ ¼ 1 þ1e
x is applied as
activation function of the output layer to restrict the outputs of the network to be in
range (0, 1).
10 R. DING AND Z. CHEN

In addition, we employ both Dropout (Srivastava et al. 2014) and batch normalization
(BN) (Ioffe and Szegedy 2015) techniques on each hidden layer to further improve
recommendation performance. Dropout is able to alleviate the overfitting issue and
improve generalization of the deep neural network by randomly dropping neurons
(along with their connections) of the neural network during training, which can be
seen as performing model combination with a number of smaller neural networks to
reduce the generalization error of the model. BN norms each layer’s inputs to reshape
their distributions and accelerate the training process. To be summarized, the composi-
tion of each hidden layer is: Dropout (training)–BN–weights–ReLUs.
In the training phase, RecNet is trained for a binary classification task, in which a user visiting
a POI is a positive sample; otherwise, it is a negative one. The DNN predicts the likelihood that a
user visits a POI according to his/her previous check-ins in LBSNs. A cross-entropy loss is
minimized for the classification task with the Adam (Kingma and Ba 2015) optimizer. To further
alleviate the over-fitting issue, the L2 norm of each hidden layer is added to the cross-entropy
loss as the regularization term. The loss function of RecNet is given as follows:
P P
Loss ¼
ð yuv logð^yuv Þ þ ð1
yuv Þlogð1
^yuv ÞÞ þ λnet k Wnet k2 (10)
u2U v2V [ V

u u

where Wnet denotes all the weights in the network and λnet is the parameter of the regulariza-
tion term. yuv is the label of the user–POI pair ðu; vÞ. More specifically, yuv is set to 1 if v 2 Vu ,
which means that u has visited POI v. Otherwise, yuv is set to 0 when v 2 Vu
, which indicates
that POI v has not been visited by u. The cross-entropy is designed to learn users’ personalized
preferences by assigning higher scores to their visited POIs and lower scores to those unvisited,
which has been proved effective for implicit feedback datasets in recommender systems
(Covington et al. 2016, He et al. 2017). As most of POIs are unvisited for a user, we randomly
sample s POIs that have not been visited by the user for an observed check-in to train the DNN-
based recommendation model.
For inference, each POI is assigned a score for the given user by RecNet. Then, the
model gives k of the highest scoring POIs as the recommendation result, ranked by their
scores.

4.3. Summary of RecNet

RecNet exploits both collaborative and content information in LBSNs via an MF-based
featuring embedding method and learns their joint influence on user behavior by a
deep neural network. In particular, RecNet is able to recommend POIs to a new user who
has no check-ins in LBSNs. The feature vector of the new user is set to a zero vector and
fed into RecNet with feature vectors of POIs pairwise to obtain predicted scores. In this
case, only features of POIs are exploited in the recommendation process.
The main difference between RecNet and previous POI recommendation methods is
that we provide a general recommendation framework which utilizes DNN to incorpo-
rate various features and learn their joint influence for POI recommendation. Existing
methods are usually designed for specific features in LBSNs and difficult to be extended
for other features. In our proposed framework, we can feed all embedded features of
users and POIs into a DNN and let the network adaptively learn interactions of features
for POI recommendation.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 11

5. Experiments
5.1. Datasets
Our experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets. The first one is the
Foursquare check-ins within Tokyo (Yang et al. 2014) and the second one is the Gowalla
check-ins within New York City (Liu et al. 2013, 2014). Following the previous work, we
remove the users who have visited fewer than 5 POIs and the POIs which have been
visited by fewer than 5 users. The basic statistics of the two datasets after processing are
shown in Table 3.

5.2. Comparative methods

In the experiments, we compare RecNet with several state-of-the-art algorithms for POI
recommendation to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Comparative algorithms are listed as follows:

● WRMF: Weighted regularized MF (Hu et al. 2008) is a widely used recommendation

technique for implicit feedback datasets which factorizes the user–POI matrix to
obtain vector representations for users and POIs.
● BPR-MF: BPR-MF is a ranking-based factorization method which combines Bayesian
Personalized Ranking criterion (Rendle et al. 2009) with the popular ranking-based
MF in the learning process.
● USG: USG (Ye et al. 2011) is a unified POI recommendation framework, which
utilizes user-based collaborative filtering and Naive Bayesian to fuse user prefer-
ence to a POI with social influence and geographical influence.
● GeoMF: GeoMF (Lian et al. 2014) is a weighted MF method for POI recommenda-
tion, which extends WRMF by incorporating the spatial clustering phenomenon in
LBSNs into MF to improve recommendation performance.
● Rank-GeoFM: Rank-GeoFM (Li et al. 2015) is a ranking-based geographical factor-
ization approach for POI recommendation. Geographical influence in LBSNs is
incorporated with user preference in a weighted scheme to obtain the latent
representations for POIs and users.
● ARMF: ARMF (Li et al. 2016) is a hybrid recommendation framework which exploits
potential check-ins from users’ friends for accurate POI recommendation. In addi-
tion, geographical and categorical correlations between users and POIs are also
incorporated in the recommendation process.

Among these comparative algorithms, WRMF and BPR-MF are classic factorization
methods for implicit feedback datasets. USG, GeoMF, Rank-GeoFM and ARMF are state-
of-the-art methods for POI recommendation, which exploits geographical influence or
other features in LBSNs to improve recommendation performance.

Table 3. Basic statistics of datasets.

Dataset #User #POI #Check-in #Category
Foursquare 2293 7873 447,547 186
Gowalla 5483 8172 347,855 265
12 R. DING AND Z. CHEN

We tune the parameters of comparative algorithms according to the tuning set in our
experiments and the best performance of each algorithm is reported. For our proposed
RecNet, λo , λg and λc in the feature embedding process are set to 0.001. λnet in the cross-
entropy loss is set to 0.00001 empirically. Other key parameters of RecNet are discussed
in the following subsection.

5.3. Evaluation metrics

To learn each user’s personalized preferences for the POI recommendation task, we ran-
domly select 70% of each user’s visited POIs as the training set, 10% as the tuning set and
the remaining 20% of his/her visited POIs as the test set for evaluation following precious
studies (Ye et al. 2011, Lian et al. 2014, Li et al. 2016). Three popular metrics (Li et al. 2015,
Zhang and Wang 2016) for top-k POI recommendation are adopted in this paper:
0
● Precision@k: Given a user u with a test set Vu , precision of top-k recommendation
is measured as follows:
jVk \ V 0 uj
Precision@k ¼ (11)
k
where Vk is the top-k recommendation results given by algorithms.

● Recall@k: Similar to the Precision@k metric, recall of top-k recommendation is

defines as:
jVk \ V 0 uj
Recall@k ¼ (12)
jV 0 uj

● MRR: MRR measures the average rank of ground-truth POIs in a user’s recommen-
dation result, which is defined as

1 X 1
MRR ¼ (13)
jV 0 uj v2V 0 ruv
u

where ruv indicates the rank of the ground-truth POI v in u‘s recommendation list. A
large value of MRR usually indicates a high quality of ranking.
The three metrics above correspond to only one user and the general performance of
recommendation algorithms is computed by averaging the metrics on all users.

5.4. Recommendation performance

In this subsection, we discuss the performance of RecNet and other comparative
methods on the Foursquare and Gowalla datasets. Figure 2 and Table 4 show the
comparative results for the performance of all algorithms. Following previous studies
(Ye et al. 2011, Li et al. 2015), we only present the results where k is set to 5, 10 and 20,
as a greater value of k is usually ignored for a typical top-k recommendation task.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 13

(a) Precision on Foursquare (b) Recall on Foursquare

(c) Precision on Gowalla (d) Recall on Gowalla

Figure 2. Comparative results on both datasets.

Table 4. MRR of all algorithms on both datasets.

Foursquare Gowalla
WRMF 0.0274 0.0424
BPR-MF 0.0301 0.0439
USG 0.0369 0.0501
GeoMF 0.0330 0.0492
Rank-GeoFM 0.0417 0.0512
ARMF 0.0351 0.0470
RecNet 0.0460 0.0567

Several observations are made from the results: (1) It is clear that our proposed
RecNet outperforms all comparative methods for POI recommendation on the two
LBSNs datasets, showing RecNet is effective for the personalized POI recommendation
task in LBSNs. (2) Both WRMF and BPR-MF drop behind other algorithms as they only
simply factorize the user–POI matrix without exploiting geographical influence or other
features in LBSNs to model users’ check-in behavior. So they may suffer from the data
sparsity issue. (3) USG and GeoMF outperforms WRMF and BPR-MF, indicating that
modeling geographical influence in LBSNs is important for POI recommendation. (4)
Rank-GeoFM obtains much better performance than other comparative algorithms
except RecNet as it introduces the WARP (Weston et al. 2010) loss to get a better
ranking result and exploits geographical influence of neighbor POIs to alleviate the
data sparsity issue. (5) ARMF employs both geographical and categorical information in
14 R. DING AND Z. CHEN

LBSNs while it still performs worse than RecNet, indicating that RecNet is able to
incorporate various features for POI recommendation more effectively than ARMF. (6)
RecNet outperforms all comparative methods on both datasets, showing the advantage
of employing DNNs to incorporate various features in LBSNs and learn their joint
influence on user behavior. RecNet is able to learn high-order interactions of features
by DNN while comparative methods are not able to incorporate these features effec-
tively as they are based on traditional collaborative filtering or MF, which only exploits
linear or low-order interactions of features.

5.5. Parameter sensitivity analysis

We investigate the impacts of several key hyper-parameters in RecNet, which are latent
vector dimensionality d, geographical distance threshold m and number s of sampled
unvisited POIs for each observed check-in. We choose the MRR metric to show the
impacts on the performance of RecNet with various values of hyper-parameters.
Experiments are conducted on both the Foursquare and Gowalla datasets.
Figure 3(a) firstly presents the impacts of latent vector dimensionality d. The perfor-
mance of RecNet increases with d as high dimension representation contains more latent
factor information and captures the relationships between various features more precisely.
However, a larger d costs longer training times as well. So we set d = 100 to achieve a
trade-off between recommendation performance and training times.
The impacts of geographical distance threshold m on the performance of RecNet are
presented in Figure 3(b). We can observe that incorporating geographical influence in
LBSNs does provide performance improvements for POI recommendation as m
increases. RecNet achieves its best performance when m is 3 km on the Foursquare
dataset and m is 4 km on the Gowalla dataset. However, the performance of RecNet
drops with a larger m as it introduces so many neighbors for a POI that geographical
influence cannot be exploited precisely. So we set m = 3 and 4 km for the Foursquare
and Gowalla datasets, respectively.
In addition, the number s of sampled unvisited POIs for each observed check-in also
significantly affects the performance of RecNet and the impacts of s are depicted in
Figure 4. RecNet shows much better performance when a larger s is given on both

(a) d (b) m

Figure 3. Impacts of vector dimensionality and geographical distance threshold.

 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SCIENCE 15

Figure 4. Impacts of the number of sampled unvisited POIs.

datasets. An explanation is that sampling more unvisited POIs in the training phase
helps the DNN distinguish users’ preferred POIs from those they dislike. However,
sampling more unvisited POIs also costs longer training times. To obtain the trade-off
between recommendation performance and training times, we empirically set s = 20 for
both the Gowalla and Foursquare datasets in our experiments.

5.6. Discussion on network size

We also carry out comparative experiments to show the benefits brought by the
size of network on the performance of POI recommendation. More specifically, we
design five variants of RecNet with different widths and depths, which are listed as
follows:

● RecNet-V1: A simple network with only a linear transformation layer

● RecNet-V2: 256 ReLUs ! Sigmoid
● RecNet-V3: 512 ReLUs ! 256 ReLUs ! Sigmoid
● RecNet-V4: 1024 ReLUs ! 512 ReLUs ! 256 ReLUs ! Sigmoid
● RecNet-V5: 2048 ReLUs ! 1024 ReLUs ! 512 ReLUs ! 256 ReLUs ! Sigmoid

where RecNet-V1 is the simplest network which has no hidden layers while RecNet-V5
has the largest network size among the five variants.
Comparative experiments follow the same experimental settings above and the
performance of all variants in terms of MRR is shown in Table 5. We can observe that
increasing the size of network does enhance the recommendation performance since
RecNet-V5 outperforms other variants on both datasets, which has a maximum width
and depth among the five models. A wider and deeper network can model more
interactions between features by introducing more network parameters while it takes
a long time to train the model and is more sensitive to hyper parameters as well.
Therefore, it is not recommended to train a larger network than RecNet-V5 for the
trade-off between recommendation performance and training times.
16 R. DING AND Z. CHEN

Table 5. MRR of all variants on both datasets.

Variant Foursquare Gowalla
RecNet-V1 0.0345 0.0468
RecNet-V2 0.0423 0.0515
RecNet-V3 0.0451 0.0548
RecNet-V4 0.0458 0.0566
RecNet-V5 0.0460 0.0567

6. Conclusions and future work

As most existing methods designed for personalized POI recommendation are not able
to incorporate various features in LBSNs effectively, a DNN-based POI recommendation
framework, named RecNet, is proposed in this paper to learn the joint influence of
features in LBSNs on user behavior. To alleviate the data sparsity issue, co-visiting
pattern, geographical influence and categorical correlation in LBSNs are utilized and
converted to vector representations of POIs and users via an MF-based feature embed-
ding method. Then, embedded POIs and users are fed into a deep neural network
pairwise to train the recommendation model. Extensive experiments are conducted to
evaluate the performance of RecNet and other comparative methods. The results show
that RecNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods for POI recommendation.
Future work will focus on the extension of RecNet to support successive or time-
aware scenarios, which needs to model dynamic user preference in the given spatial-
temporal contexts.

Notes
1. https://foursquare.com/.
2. https://www.yelp.com/.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported in part by grants from the National Key R&D Program of China
[No.2017YFB1002202] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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