Contrastive graph learning long and short-term interests for POI recommendation

Modeling users’ short-term dynamic and long-term static interests to enhance Point-of-Interests (POI) recommendation performance has shown lots of advantages. Since users’ check-in records can be viewed as a graph network, methods based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently shown promising applicability for POI recommendation. However, existing GNN-based works have the following shortcomings: (1) ignoring the impact of complex higher-order relationships between user-POI dynamics over time; and (2) ignoring the difference in POI importance that cannot effectively capture the imbalances of geographical influence among POIs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Self-supervised Long-and Short-term model (SLS-REC) for POI recommendation. Specifically, we first design a spatio-temporal Hawkes attention hypergraph neural network to capture the spatial dependence and temporal evolution in users’ short-term dynamic interests. Then we introduce a dynamic propagation mechanism of GNNs to learn the geographic influences underlying geographic imbalances among POIs. In addition, the contrastive learning framework over a fine-grained node dropout strategy is applied to maximize the mutual information of long and short-term interest representations. Finally, we adaptively unify the recommendation and self-supervised task with an attention-based mechanism to optimize the proposed SLS-REC model for POI recommendation. Experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.