Location-aware neural graph collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is initiated by representing users and items as vectors and seeks to describe the relationship between users and items at a profound level, thus predicting users’ preferred behavior. To address the issue that previous research ignored higher-order geographical interactions hidden in users’ historical behaviors, this paper proposes a location-aware neural graph collaborative filtering model (LA-NGCF), which incorporates location information of items for improving prediction performance. The model characterizes the interactions between items based on spatial decay law from a graph perspective and designs two strategies to capture the interaction effects of users and items considering node heterogeneity. An optimized loss function with spatial distances of items is also developed in the model. Extensive experiments are conducted on three publicly available real-world datasets to examine the effectiveness of our model. Results show that LA-NGCF achieves competitive performances compared with several state-of-the-art models, which suggests that location information of items is beneficial for improving the performance of personalized recommendations. This paper offers an approach to incorporate weighted interactions between items into CF algorithms and enriches the methods of utilizing geographical information for artificial intelligence applications.