Modeling Long and Short Term User Preferences by Leveraging Multi-Dimensional Auxiliary Information for Next POI Recommendation

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has shown great value for both users and providers in location-based services. Existing methods mainly rely on partial information in users’ check-in sequences, and are brittle to users with few interactions. Moreover, they ignore the impact of multi-dimensional auxiliary information such as user check-in frequency, POI category on user preferences modeling and the impact of dynamic changes in user preferences over different time periods on recommendation performance. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel method for next POI recommendation by modeling long and short term user preferences with multi-dimensional auxiliary information. In particular, the proposed model includes a static LSTM module to capture users’ multi-dimensional long term static preferences and a dynamic meta-learning module to capture users’ multi-dimensional dynamic preferences. Furthermore, we incorporate a POI category filter into our model to comprehensively simulate users’ preferences. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods in two commonly used evaluation metrics.