Neural Embedding Features for Point-of-Interest Recommendation

The focus of point-of-interest recommendation techniques is to suggest a venue to a given user that would match the users' interests and is likely to be adopted by the user. Given the multitude of venues and the sparsity of user check-ins, the problem of recommending venues has shown to be a difficult task. Existing literature has already explored various types of features such as geographical distribution, social structure and temporal behavioral patterns to make a recommendation. In this paper, we propose a new set of features derived based on the neural embeddings of venues and users. We show how the neural embeddings for users and venues can be jointly learnt based on the prior check-in sequence of users and then be used to define three types of features, namely user, venue, and user-venue interaction features. These features are integrated into a feature-based matrix factorization model. Our experiments show that the features defined over the user and venue embeddings are effective for venue recommendation.