A Context-Aware Location Recommendation System for Tourists Using Hierarchical LSTM Model

Wafa Shafqat and Yung-Cheol Byun
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Wafa Shafqat: Department of Computer Engineering, Jeju National University, Jeju 63243, Korea
Yung-Cheol Byun: Department of Computer Engineering, Jeju National University, Jeju 63243, Korea

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 10, 1-23

Abstract: The significance of contextual data has been recognized by analysts and specialists in numerous disciplines such as customization, data recovery, ubiquitous and versatile processing, information mining, and management. While a generous research has just been performed in the zone of recommender frameworks, by far most of the existing approaches center on prescribing the most relevant items to customers. It usually neglects extra-contextual information, for example time, area, climate or the popularity of different locations. Therefore, we proposed a deep long-short term memory (LSTM) based context-enriched hierarchical model. This proposed model had two levels of hierarchy and each level comprised of a deep LSTM network. In each level, the task of the LSTM was different. At the first level, LSTM learned from user travel history and predicted the next location probabilities. A contextual learning unit was active between these two levels. This unit extracted maximum possible contexts related to a location, the user and its environment such as weather, climate and risks. This unit also estimated other effective parameters such as the popularity of a location. To avoid feature congestion, XGBoost was used to rank feature importance. The features with no importance were discarded. At the second level, another LSTM framework was used to learn these contextual features embedded with location probabilities and resulted into top ranked places. The performance of the proposed approach was elevated with an accuracy of 97.2%, followed by gated recurrent unit (GRU) (96.4%) and then Bidirectional LSTM (94.2%). We also performed experiments to find the optimal size of travel history for effective recommendations.

Keywords: context aware; recommendation system; LSTM; feature importance; XGBoost; tourism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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