Social Topic Modeling for Point-of-Interest Recommendation in Location-Based Social Networks

In this paper, we address the problem of recommending Point-of-Interests (POIs) to users in a location-based social network. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose the ST (Social Topic) model capturing both the social and topic aspects of user check-ins. We conduct experiments on real life data sets from Foursquare and Yelp. We evaluate the effectiveness of ST by evaluating the accuracy of top-k POI recommendation. The experimental results show that ST achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art models in the areas of social network-based recommender systems, and exploits the power of the location-based social network that has never been utilized before.