Next Point-of-Interest Recommendation with Auto-Correlation Enhanced Multi-Modal Transformer Network

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is a pivotal issue for researchers in the field of location-based social networks. While many recent efforts show the effectiveness of recurrent neural network-based next POI recommendation algorithms, several important challenges have not been well addressed yet: (i) The majority of previous models only consider the dependence of consecutive visits, while ignoring the intricate dependencies of POIs in traces; (ii) The nature of hierarchical and the matching of sub-sequence in POI sequences are hardly model in prior methods; (iii) Most of the existing solutions neglect the interactions between two modals of POI and the density category. To tackle the above challenges, we propose an auto-correlation enhanced multi-modal Transformer network (AutoMTN) for the next POI recommendation. Particularly, AutoMTN uses the Transformer network to explicitly exploits connections of all the POIs along the trace. Besides, to discover the dependencies at the sub-sequence level and attend to cross-modal interactions between POI and category sequences, we replace self-attention in Transformer with the auto-correlation mechanism and design a multi-modal network. Experiments results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the ascendancy of AutoMTN contra state-of-the-art methods in the next POI recommendation.