Personalized recommendation for location based social network

D.Hemamalini

Abstract - Recommendation systems have received considerable attention in the recent decades. Yet with the
development of information technology and social media, the risk in revealing private data to service providers
has been a growing concern to more and more users. With the rapid development of global position system and
location-based social networks (LBNS) have attracted millions of users to share rich information. Point-of-
interest (POI) recommender system plays an important role in LBSNs. Data collected through LBSN activity can
enable better recommendations of places or points of interest such restaurants and malls. Point-of-Interest
recommendation approaches from traditional recommendation approaches. The decision process for a user to
choose POI is complex and can be influenced by numerous factors, such as personal preferences, geographical
considerations, and user mobility behaviors. Geographical proximity, known as a unique feature of LBSNs,
significantly affects user check-in behavior. However, most of prior studies characterize the geographical
influence based on a universal or personalized distribution of geographic distance, leading to unsatisfactory
recommendation results. In this paper, design a framework for the personalized geographical influence in a two-
dimensional geographical space is modeled using the data field method, and we propose a semi-supervised
probabilistic model based on a factor graph model to integrate different factors such as the geographical
influence. Moreover, a distributed learning algorithm is used to scale up our method to large-scale data sets.
Experimental results show that our method outperforms other competing POI recommendation techniques.

Index Term Recommender system, Geographical Proximity, LBSN, POI, Distributed Learning Algorithm

1. INTRODUCTION also help LBSNs to increase revenues by providing

With the rapid development of mobile devices, global
position system (GPS) and location based social
networks (LBNS) have become very popular and
attracted lots of attention from industry and
academia. Typical location-based social networks
include Foursquare, Face book Place, and GeoLife,
etc... In LBSNs, users can build connections with
their friends, upload photos, and share their locations
via check-in for points of interest (e.g., restaurants,
tourists spots, and stores, etc.). Besides providing
users with social interaction platforms, it is more
desired for LBNs to make use of the rich information
(social relationship, check-in history and so on) to
mine users preferences on locations and recommend
new places where users may be interested in. The
task of recommending new interesting places is
referred as point-of-interest (POI) recommendation.
POI recommender system have played an important
role in LBSNs since they can not only meet users
personalized preferences for visiting new places, but
users with intelligent location services, such as
location-aware advertisements.
POI recommender systems have just
emerged recently. Differing from traditional
recommender systems, POI recommender systems
have the following unique characteristics.
Geographical Influence. As the Toblers First Law
of Geography reported that Everything is related to
everything else. But near things are more related than
distant thing (Toler) 1970). For LBNs, the Toblers
First Law of Geography implies that users prefer to
visit nearby locations rather than distant ones and
users may be interested in POIs surrounded a POI
that users prefer. Geographical Influence is the most
important characteristic that distinguish POI
recommender systems from traditional recommender
systems and heavily effect users visiting behaviors.
Frequency data and Sparsity. In traditional
recommender systems, user generally expressed their
preferences by explicitly providing rating for items.
Which are converted to user item rating matrix. The
ratings are often numerical values and fall into a
numerical range. The higher rating corresponds the
better satisfactory. Which are often transformed to
user-location check-in frequency matrix. The
frequency data have a large range compared with
ratings.
Social influence. Based on the assumption that
friends are tend to share more common interest and
users often tend to their friend for suggestions,
traditional recommender systems combine social
relationship with ratings to improve the quality of
recommendation. Several studies (Ma et al.2008;
Jamali and Ester 2010) have showed that social
relationships are demonstrated to be beneficial for
recommender systems. Hence social influence
contributes limited effects on users check-in
behaviors.
Temporal Influence Enhanced POI .There exists
studies that consider temporal influence in traditional
recommender systems, such as matrix factorization
based approach (Korean 2010), random walk based
approach (Xiang et al. 2010). However, in traditional
recommendation systems, temporal influence is used
to as a factor that decays the weights of ratings.POI
recommendation systems generally use temporal
influence to make POI recommendation for a specific
temporal state.
A point-of-interest (POI) is a specific spatial
location (such as a hotel) that could be interesting or
useful to someone else in a LBSN. A users visits to a
given POI, also known as check-in activities, by and
large re- flect his/her preference for the
corresponding place in the real world. In recent
years, POI recommendation has attracted increasing
at- tention due to the importance of understanding
human behavior and the potential business value
related to that.
Unlike the traditional recommender sys- tems that
focus on non-spatial items (such as books and
movies), POI recommendation requires users to
visit or check in locations in a LBSN. Geographical
proximity has a great impact on user check-in
behavior[2], that is, nearby friends always share
more common POIs than the others who live far
away[3]. However, human mobility behavior
presents a challenge for the methods that make
recom- mendations based on the distances between
users places of residence. To address the issue,
some researchers have attempted to recommend
possible POIs to target users in terms of the
geographic distance between lo- cations. Prior
studies assume that the distances between POIs that a
user visited before follow a universal or
personalized distribution[1, 2, 4-6], and the
probability of a user visiting a POI can be calculated
according to the geo- graphic distance between them.
Unfortunately, these studies are subject to some
limitations, e.g., the deficiency of locations intrinsic
char- acteristics and the difficulty in finding a rea-
sonable reference location[7]. Therefore, some recent
studies began to model the geographical influence
over two-dimensional geographic coordinates
(latitude and longitude)[7], aiming at characterizing
user check-in behavior better.
On the other hand, according to the social
correlation[8] of social theories, human move- ment
and mobility patterns are also affected by their social
friendships, and a few recommend- er systems have
utilized the social influence in conventional social
networks to improve pre- diction performance[9].
For example, accord- ing to the result of our
experiment conducted on the data sets which were
collected from Foursquare[10] and Gowalla[5],
although less than 10% of a users check-ins are also
visited by his/her friends, the probability of checking
in the same POI for two friends is, on average, much
higher than that for two strangers.
To sum up, unified framework integrat- ing different
factors seems to be a feasible solution to improve
the quality of POI recom- mendation. How to model
the personalized geographical influence in terms of
geographic spatial distribution, and further
characterize user check-in behavior better by
integrating the social influence with the
geographical in- fluence, is the challenge we face.
To address the issue, in this paper we propose an
effective and scalable POI recommendation
framework that returns the top K POIs with the
highest scores to each target user. The main contribu-
tions of this paper are summarized as follows:
(1) We model the personalized geograph- ical
influence on user check-in behavior in terms of
geographic spatial distribution using the data field
method[11], because it has the advantage in
describing the non-contact inter-action between data
objects. In particular, to alleviate the cold-start
problem, we learn the effect of each location on
individual users by considering both his/her
historical check-in records and the geographic
spatial distribution of all POIs.
(2) We propose a unified and flexible rec-
ommendation framework based on a factor graph
model[12] to integrate different factors (such as user
preference and geo-social in- fluence), which can
automatically determine the degree of each factor
s contribution by optimizing the model parameters.
Besides, we propose a distributed learning
algorithm to improve the scalability of our method
when dealing with large-scale data sets.
(3) According to the two large-scale real data sets
collected from Foursquare and Gow- alla, we
conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the
recommendation accuracy and scalability of our
method. The experimental results show that our
method achieves better performance than several
state-of-the-art POI recommendation approaches.
II. RELATED WORK
Recommender systems utilizing the information
shared in social networks have recently attracted
tremendous attention from both academia [21, 23, 24,
33] and industry [34]. Konstas et al. [21] have
proposed a recommendation algorithm that performs
a Random Walk with Restarts on a graph established
among users, items and tags. Ma et al. [23, 24] have
incorporated users social friendships into model-
based collaborative recommender systems. All these
approaches aim to recommend traditional items, such
as movies; the effectiveness of these approaches in
geo social networks has not yet been evaluated. Ye et
al. [33] have proposed a unified POI recommendation
framework in geosocial networks, which fuses user
preferences for POI with social influence and
geographical influence.
Some of the earliest privacy-preserving approaches
for recommender systems come from Canny [7, 8],
who has proposed using homomorphic encryption
and a peer-to-peer protocol to provide privacy for
several model-based collaborative recommender
systems. Similar ideas have been explored [17,26].
Polat and Du [29] have proposed that customers use a
randomized perturbation technique to disturb their
private data before sending the data to the SP. Similar
ideas have also been explored [5, 20]. Ameur et al.
[2] have proposed using a semi trusted third party to
distill encoded sensitive customer information.
Previous work aims to keep individual user records
hidden from the SP or other users. Our research
differs from these approaches because our research
aims to keep users social relations secret from the
SP, while still providing users with the benefits of
social recommendations. Machanavajjhala et al. [25]
have studied social recommendations solely based on
a social graph. Their results suggest accurate
recommendations inevitably leak information about
the existence of edges between certain nodes. Our
work differs from theirs because a) we are trying to
hide the social relations from the SP and b) social
recommendations in our framework are integrated
with other recommender systems. The closest
references to our research can be found in the
literature of privacy for social relations in social
networks. Anderson et al. [3] have proposed an
architecture for social networking that protects users
social information from both the operator and other
network users. Domingo-Ferrer et al. [15] have
proposed a scheme to prevent the resource owner in
social networks from learning the relationships and
trust levels between the users who collaborate in the
resource access. Tootoonchian et al. [32] have
proposed a cryptographic framework, Lockr, to
separate social networking content from all other
online social network functions. Backes et al. [4]
have proposed a similar approach to achieve access
control while keeping social relations hidden from
the SP. We exploit a similar idea as relation
authentication [4] to implement access control.
Recently, POI recommendation has emerged as a
popular topic in the field of recommender systems.
According to the data available on the Internet
such as user check-in records, GPS trajectory
data[13], and text data[14], the simplest way to
provide a POI recommenda- tion service is with
those conventional recom- mendation techniques
such as collaborative filtering. However, using only
the information of user check-in records is not
enough to as- sure accurate POI recommendation
results, which suggests that more additional
informa- tion should be considered together.
The geographical feature of POIs is actual- ly a
unique identifier distinguishing them from other non-
spatial items[7]. On the one hand, some prior
studies[3] calculated the similarity between users in
terms of their geographical influence, and then
recommended possible POIs using collaborative
filtering techniques. On the other hand, other prior
studies investi- gated the geographical influence of
locations. For example, Cheng[15] et al. viewed
loca- tions as ordinary non-spatial items and quan-
tified the geographical influence of locations by
predefining a range; Kurashima[16] et al. proposed
a geo-topic model based on the as- sumption that if a
location is closer to a users current location or the
locations he/she visit- ed, it is more likely to be
visited by the user; Lian[17] et al. proposed a
weighted matrix factorization model which
augmented users and POIs latent factors in the
model with ac- tivity area vectors of users and
influence area vectors of POIs, respectively.
In many prior studies[1, 2, 4, 5], the dis- tances
between locations visited by the same user were
modeled based on a common distri- bution for all
users, e.g., a power-law distri- bution or a multi-
center Gaussian distribution. Although this benefits
the quality of POI recommendation to some extent,
a common distribution for all users often ignores the
per- sonalized geographical influence. Therefore,
Zhang[6] et al. utilized kernel density estima- tion to
estimate the distribution of distances between pairs
of locations for each individual user. Furthermore, a
latest study[7] attempted to characterize user check-
in behavior using two-dimensional kernel density
estimation.
Inspired by the findings in traditional social
networks, several POI recommendation ap-
proaches[3, 5, 14] took into consideration the social
influence, but the results indicated that the effect of
such a factor was not significant, because there was,
on average, a small over- lap of a user s check-ins
to his/her friends check-ins. Besides this one,
some researchers have also utilized the information
of time and content to provide better
recommendation re- sults. For example, Gao[18] et
al. studied the temporal cyclic patterns of check-ins
in terms of temporal non-uniformness and
temporal consecutiveness, and they proposed a
time- aware POI recommendation model; Yin[19]
et al. proposed a location-content-aware topic model
in consideration of both personal inter- est and local
preference.
III. PROBLEM DEFINITION
We explore the information of user preference, social
influence and personalized geographical influence,
and then integrate them into a uni- fied probabilistic
model to recommend proper POIs for target users.
Next, we formalize the problem of this study.
Given a set of venues (POIs) V = {v1, v2,, vM}, L
= {l1, l2,, lM} is the set of locations of POIs,
where M is the number of POIs and each location has
longitude and latitude coor- dinates. Let U = {u1,
u2,, uN} be the set of users and G be the matrix of
the relationships between users, where N is the
number of us- ers. C = (cij)NM is a check-in
frequency matrix with each element (also defined as
check-in variable) representing the frequency of
check- ing in POI vj (with lj) by user ui. Assuming
that CL is an observed check-in action matrix, the
set of observations can be denoted as O = (U; V; G;
CL). According to all the observations, our task is to
predict the probability that a giv- en user visits a new
POI, and to recommend the top-k POIs to the user.
IV GEOGRAPHICAL INFLUENCE
According to the Toblers first law of geog-
raphy[20], the locations near the place where a user
usually visits, are more likely to be recommended
to the user. Users differ in the geographic spatial
distribution of already-vis- ited locations. The
frequency distribution of a users historical check-
ins reflects his/her preference for different locations,
and the preferences of various users for the same POI
are also different. Therefore, modeling the geo-
graphical influence of locations on user check- in
behavior is the key to solving the problem in this
paper. Unlike the statistical method used in the
latest study[7], in this paper we use the data field
method[11] to model the mutual interaction between
locations by constructing virtual fields in a two-
dimensional geographi- cal space.
This study assumes that the location of a POI
represents a two-dimensional data point and that the
number of user check-ins for the location is the mass
of the data point. A data field in the two-
dimensional geographic spa- tial space is then
constructed. We illustrate the modeling process with
a simple example.
Figure 1 shows the distributions of two users check-
in locations, and Figure 2 further shows the
corresponding distributions of personal check-in
locations in Figure 1 in terms of data field. In each
data field, we can calculate the potential value of a
given point, which is regarded as the geographical
influence of a location on an individual user. The
higher the potential value, the more likely a user is to
prefer the corresponding location.
 Fig.1 Distributions of personal check-in locations
Fig.2 The corresponding distributions of personal
check-in locations in terms of data fi eld
V. A UNIFIED POI RECOMMENDATION
FRAMEWORK
5.1 Model specification
The main goal of this paper is to build a model based
on a factor graph model[12] to predict the
probability that a given user visits a new POI. Here,
we present a simple example. As shown in Figure
3, the observed variables, including users (u1 ~ u5)
and their friendships (denoted by dashed lines in
Figure 3), POIs (v1 ~ v5), and locations associated
with the POIs (l1 ~ l5), are the input of our model;
the latent variable, namely the check-in variable
(whose definition please refer to Section III), is
solved by our model.
Because only a fraction of the check-in variables
values are exactly known (denoted by solid lines in
Figure 3), our task is to predict the missing entries
(viz. unlabelled
data) in each check-in variable vector. This is a
typical semi-supervised learning process. In our
model, we use the state factor f and the correlation
factor g to model the geographical influence and the
social influence, respective- ly, and the two types of
factors are described as follows:
-- State factor: Given the check-in records of user u i,
f(u i, C i) represents the posterior probability that
user u i visits a given POI, which reflects the
geographical influence of POIs on decision-making
behavior of users.
-- Correlation factor: g(Ci, G(Ci)) denotes the
correlation between the check-in variables of
different users, where G(Ci) is the set of the vectors
of other users related to Ci. It reflects the influence
of friends check-in behavior on users decisions.
5.2 Distributed learning algorithm
Our learning algorithm is indeed extensible and
scalable to address the needs that real LBSNs may
contain millions of users and POIs. To achieve
scalability on large-scale data sets, a distributed
learning algorithm is proposed based on the message
passing interface (MPI) to speed up the calculation
of each parameters gradient via NBP.
This algorithm adopts a master/slave architecture.
One master node is used to update the parameters,and
other slave nodes are used to calculate their
gradients. In the initial stage we partition the set of
POIs into P subsets roughly equal, where P denotes
the number of slave nodes.
In each iteration in Algorithm 1, the master node
sends the updated parameter configuration to all slave
nodes first. The slave nodes compute the marginal
probability of the corresponding subset using NBP,
and then send the gradients of the parameters
obtained to the master node. Eventually, the master
node sums all the gradients gathered from different
subsets, and then updates the parameters using the
gradient descent algorithm.
5.3 Performance
In our experiment, each data set in question was
divided into a training set and a testing set according
to check-in time, that is, 70% of the previous check-
in records were used as the training set and the rest
were used as the testing set. The parameters of each
method under discussion were set to their own
optima for the two data sets. The experiment was
repeated five times independently to reduce random
errors generated during the experiment, and we used
the average of evaluation metric values as the final
result to increase reliability of the measurement.
6. Conclusion
To recommend more appropriate POIs to tar- get
users, in this paper we consider both the
personalized geographical influence and the social
influence on individual user check-in behavior. In
particular, the personalized geo- graphical influence
in a two- dimensional geo- graphical space is
modeled using the data field method. A unified
semi-supervised probabi- listic model, which is
based on a factor graph model, is then proposed to
integrate the above factors. Furthermore, a distributed
learning al- gorithm is proposed to scale up our
method to handle large-scale data sets. Experimental
re- sults based on Foursquare and Gowalla show that
our method outperforms other competing approaches
with regard to the evaluation met- rics. Finally, our
future work will extend our model by integrating
more useful factors such as user-generated tags[23]
and check-in time to improve its prediction
performance
I. Social Recommender Systems.
Most proposed social recommender systems include two components: social influences, which define how
much influence each friend has on a user; recommendation algorithms, which define how to compute
recommendations with friends social influences and their ratings of each item/POI as inputs. The definition of
social influence varies in different systems. The development of POI recommender systems is much more
complex than the development of traditional recommender systems.
The reasons are as follows. First, for POI recommendations, the users' interest can vary dramatically at
different time and locations. For instance, what POIs should we recommend to a resident in the New York City
when he travels to Florida? Second, the LBSN user behaviors are intrinsically spatio-temporally correlated. The
heterogeneous nature of spatio-temporal data is a big challenge for recommendation. Third, a POI is usually
associated with categories and tags to describe the POI. However, unlike traditional recommendation (i.e. article
recommendation [16]), the textual information associated with POIs is usually incomplete and ambiguous.
Finally, even two POIs with similar or even the same semantic topics can be ranked differently if they are in
two different regions. we develop a Topic and Location-aware probabilistic matrix factorization (TL-PMF)
method for POI recommendation based on the learned user and POI topic distribution, and simultaneously
incorporating location information. A unique perspective of this proposed method is to consider both the extent
to which a user interest matches the POI in terms of topic distribution and the word-of-mouth opinions of the
POI. Finally, experimental results on real-world LBSNs data show that the proposed POI recommendation
method outperforms state-of-the-art probabilistic latent factor models with a significant margin in terms of both
prediction and Top-N recommendation.
 II. A TOPIC AND LOCATION AWARE PROBABILISTIC MATRIX FACTORIZATION (TL-PMF)
MODEL
The POI recommendation is personalized, location-aware, and context depended, we introduce a Topic and
Location-aware probabilistic matrix factorization (TL-PMF) method for POI recommendation by considering
both the extent to which a user interest matches the POI in terms of topic distribution and the word-of-mouth
opinions of the POI. In addition to the POI textual information and word-of-mouth opinions, we have the LBSN
user's historical check-in record matrix R with rij being the number of times user ui has checked in POI cj . This
also applies when rij is binary variable (rij = 1 meaning ui interested in POI cj and rij = 0 meaning not). We see
rij as the rating of a user ui for POI cj. For POI recommendation in LNSNs, we need to consider both (1) the
extent to which the POI interest topic matches a user's personalized interest in terms of topics, and (2) the
regional level word-of-mouth opinion for a POI in terms of popularity scores in a region. The rating rij of a user
ui for POI cj is determined by user factors and POI factors. On the one hand, the rating should reflect the
matching between the POI topic and the user interest topic. The rating is higher if two topic distributions match
better. On the other hand, the rating should reflect the word-of-mouth opinion index Pj of the local area. We
define the Topic and Location influence index of user ui for POI cj as
TLij = S(ui; cj) + (1 - )Pj
Here, S(ui; cj) is a marching score between user uj and

i=1.M

Figure 2: The TL-PMF model.

POI cj in terms of user interest topic distribution and POI topic distribution j . The second term Pj is
a regional level popularity factor for POI cj as a word-of-mouth opinion on the POI. is a factor to balance these two
factors. Then TLij considers both interest topic match between user and POI, and location aware word-of-mouth
opinions for a POI.