Attention mechanism and adaptive convolution actuated fusion network for next POI recommendation

Nextpoint-of-interest (POI) recommendation has received widespread attention in recent years due to its superiority of recommending where users will go to next. However, there exist two limitations in many recommendation methods: (1) the hardness of modeling users' short-term preferences adaptively based on input sequence; (2) the efficient learning of the joint information between users' long- and short-term preferences. To this end, we propose an attention mechanism and adaptive convolution actuated fusion network (AMACF) innovatively, which optimizes forecast effectiveness of user preference. To better model some contextual information such as category, temporal, we utilize long- and short-term memory network to learn contextual features of POIs in historical check-ins and embed self-attention mechanism to capture users' preference in the long-term module. In the short-term module, for capturing the complicated interest, the adaptive convolution network (Ada-CN) is novelly proposed, which applies the attention mechanism to aggregate multiple parallel convolution kernels selectively and adjust to short-term preference according to users' continuously updated check-ins. Furthermore, an attention-based fusion mechanism is designed to combine long- and short-term preferences, where contributions to the next POI of different users are evaluated sufficiently. Experimental results on two real-world data sets indicates that AMACF outperforms baseline methods for next POI recommendation.