SNPR: A Serendipity-Oriented Next POI Recommendation Model

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays an important role in location-based services. The state-of-the-art methods utilize recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model users' check-in sequences and have shown promising results. However, they tend to recommend POIs similar to those that the user has often visited. As a result, users become bored with obvious recommendations. To address this issue, we propose Serendipity-oriented Next POI Recommendation model (SNPR), a supervised multi-task learning problem, with objective to recommend unexpected and relevant POIs only. To this end, we define the quantitative serendipity as a trade-off of relevance and unexpectedness in the context of next POI recommendation, and design a dedicated neural network with Transformer to capture complex interdependencies between POIs in user's check-in sequence. Extensive experimental results show that our model can improve relevance significantly while the unexpectedness outperforms the state-of-the-art serendipity-oriented recommendation methods.