User Modeling for Point-of-Interest Recommendations in Location-Based Social Networks: The State of the Art

The rapid growth of location-based services (LBSs) has greatly enriched people’s urban lives and attracted millions of users in recent years. Location-based social networks (LBSNs) allow users to check-in at a physical location and share daily tips on points-of-interest (POIs) with their friends anytime and anywhere. Such check-in behavior can make daily real-life experiences spread quickly through the Internet. Moreover, such check-in data in LBSNs can be fully exploited to understand the basic laws of humans’ daily movement and mobility. This paper focuses on reviewing the taxonomy of user modeling for POI recommendations through the data analysis of LBSNs. First, we briefly introduce the structure and data characteristics of LBSNs, then we present a formalization of user modeling for POI recommendations in LBSNs. Depending on which type of LBSNs data was fully utilized in user modeling approaches for POI recommendations, we divide user modeling algorithms into four categories: pure check-in data-based user modeling, geographical information-based user modeling, spatio-temporal information-based user modeling, and geo-social information-based user modeling. Finally, summarizing the existing works, we point out the future challenges and new directions in five possible aspects.