A Collaborative Filtering Algorithm with Intragroup Divergence for POI Group Recommendation

The purpose of POI group recommendation is to generate a recommendation list of locations for a group of users. Most of the current studies first conduct personal recommendation and then use recommendation strategies to integrate individual recommendation results. Few studies consider the divergence of groups. To improve the precision of recommendations, we propose a POI group recommendation method based on collaborative filtering with intragroup divergence in this paper. Firstly, user preference vector is constructed based on the preference of the user on time and category. Furthermore, a computation method similar to TF-IDF is presented to compute the degree of preference of the user to the category. Secondly, we establish a group feature preference model, and the similarity of the group and other users' feature preference is obtained based on the check-ins. Thirdly, the intragroup divergence of POIs is measured according to the POI preference of group members and their friends. Finally, the preference rating of the group for each location is calculated based on a collaborative filtering method and intragroup divergence computation, and the top-ranked score of locations are the recommendation results for the group. Experiments have been conducted on two LBSN datasets, and the experimental results on precision and recall show that the performance of the proposed method is superior to other methods.