iGSLR : Personalized geo-social location recommendation - A kernel density estimation approach

With the rapidly growing location-based social networks (LBSNs), personalized geo-social recommendation becomes an important feature for LBSNs. Personalized geo-social recommendation not only helps users explore new places but also makes LBSNs more prevalent to users. In LBSNs, aside from user preference and social influence, geographical influence has also been intensively exploited in the process of location recommendation based on the fact that geographical proximity significantly affects users' check-in behaviors. Although geographical influence on users should be personalized, current studies only model the geographical influence on all users' check-in behaviors in a universal way. In this paper, we propose a new framework called iGSLR to exploit personalized social and geographical influence on location recommendation. iGSLR uses a kernel density estimation approach to personalize the geographical influence on users' check-in behaviors as individual distributions rather than a universal distribution for all users. Furthermore, user preference, social influence, and personalized geographical influence are integrated into a unified geo-social recommendation framework. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation for iGSLR using two large-scale real data sets collected from Foursquare and Gowalla which are two of the most popular LBSNs. Experimental results show that iGSLR provides significantly superior location recommendation compared to other state-of-the-art geo-social recommendation techniques. © 2013 ACM.