HyGate-GCN: Hybrid-Gate-Based Graph Convolutional Networks with dynamical ratings estimation for personalised POI recommendation

The presence of user-generated ratings has dramatically facilitated the development of recommendation systems to aid users in discovering relevant and personalized points of interest (POI). It is worth mentioning that users' choices and preferences are not static but rather dynamic, reflecting the ever-changing nature of human experiences and influences. Furthermore, the utilization of social influence and geographical proximity of users is still insufficient to capture the homophily effect within networks. In this paper, an interesting Hybrid Gate-based Graph Convolutional Network (HyGate-GCN) combining with feature vectors embedding and interaction, where a modified gated-GCN is proposed for personalized recommendations by adequately employing the behavior of users' check-ins, temporal properties of users' decisions, social properties of users, as well as the user/POI profile information data. Specifically, a novel POI graph reflecting the geographical proximity is first established to describe the behavior of users' check-ins and, at the same time, an improved overlap ratio about POIs is employed to effectively describe temporal properties of users' decisions. Then, an attention mechanism is developed to encode feature vectors of both the users and POIs, with the objective of assigning higher importance to features that are deemed relevant. Furthermore, a temporal Kalman filter dynamically estimating ratings is developed to exploit the information about the evolving preferences of users over time. Finally, a modified gated-GCN model with merging and refining gates is constructed to effectively acquire the homophily phenomenon in both trust network graphs and spatial adjacency matrix graphs of users and POIs respectively. Experimental results provide evidence of the effectiveness of our approach in improving accuracy and personalization.