Discovering Subsequence Patterns for Next POI Recommendation

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays an important role in location-based services. State-of-the-art methods learn the POI-level sequential patterns in the user's check-in sequence but ignore the subsequence patterns that often represent the socio-economic activities or coherence of preference of the users. However, it is challenging to integrate the semantic subsequences due to the difficulty to predefine the granularity of the complex but meaningful subsequences. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Sequence Partitioner with Power-law Attention (ASPPA) to automatically identify each semantic subsequence of POIs and discover their sequential patterns. Our model adopts a state-based stacked recurrent neural network to hierarchically learn the latent structures of the user's check-in sequence. We also design a power-law attention mechanism to integrate the domain knowledge in spatial and temporal contexts. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.