A time-aware trajectory embedding model for next-location recommendation

Next-location recommendation is an emerging task with the proliferation of location-based services. It is the task of recommending the next location to visit for a user, given her past check-in records. Although several principled solutions have been proposed for this task, existing studies have not well characterized the temporal factors in the recommendation. From three real-world datasets, our quantitative analysis reveals that temporal factors play an important role in next-location recommendation, including the periodical temporal preference and dynamic personal preference. In this paper, we propose a Time-Aware Trajectory Embedding Model (TA-TEM) to incorporate three kinds of temporal factors in next-location recommendation. Based on distributed representation learning, the proposed TA-TEM jointly models multiple kinds of temporal factors in a unified manner. TA-TEM also enhances the sequential context by using a longer context window. Experiments show that TA-TEM outperforms several competitive baselines.