Exploring IoT Location Information to Perform Point of Interest Recommendation Engine: Traveling to a New Geographical Region

With the development of wireless Internet and the popularity of location sensors in mobile phones, the coupling degree between social networks and location sensor information is increasing. Many studies in the Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) domain have begun to use social media and location sensing information to implement personalized Points-of-interests (POI) recommendations. However, this approach may fall short when a user moves to a new district or city where they have little or no activity history and social network friend information. Thus, a need to reconsider how we model the factors influencing a user’s preferences in new geographical regions in order to make personalized and relevant recommendation. A POI in LBSNs is semantically enriched with annotations such as place categories, tags, tips or user reviews which implies knowledge about the nature of the place as well as a visiting person’s interests. This provides us with opportunities to better understand the patterns in users’ interests and activities by exploiting the annotations which will continue to be useful even when a user moves to unfamiliar places. In this research, we proposed a location-aware POI recommendation system that models user preferences mainly based on user reviews, which shows the nature of activities that a user finds interesting. Using this information from users’ location history, we predict user ratings by harnessing the information present in review text as well as consider social influence from similar user set formed based on matching category preferences and similar reviews. We use real data sets partitioned by city provided by Yelp, to compare the accuracy of our proposed method against some baseline POI recommendation algorithms. Experimental results show that our algorithm achieves a better accuracy.