DeePOF: A hybrid approach of deep convolutional neural network and friendship to Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation system in location-based social networks

Today, millions of active users spend a percentage of their time on location-based social networks like Yelp and Gowalla and share their rich information. They can easily learn about their friends' behaviors and where they are visiting and be influenced by their style. As a result, the existence of personalized recommendations and the investigation of meaningful features of users and Point of Interests (POIs), given the challenges of rich contents and data sparsity, is a substantial task to accurately recommend the POIs and interests of users in location-based social networks (LBSNs). This work proposes a novel pipeline of POI recommendations named DeePOF based on deep learning and the convolutional neural network. This approach only takes into consideration the influence of the most similar pattern of friendship instead of the friendship of all users. The mean-shift clustering technique is used to detect similarity. The most similar friends' spatial and temporal features are fed into our deep CNN technique. The output of several proposed layers can predict latitude and longitude and the ID of subsequent appropriate places, and then using the friendship interval of a similar pattern, the lowest distance venues are chosen. This combination method is estimated on two popular datasets of LBSNs. Experimental results demonstrate that analyzing similar friendships could make recommendations more accurate and the suggested model for recommending a sequence of top-k POIs outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. © 2022 The Authors. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.