Muti-channel graph attention networks for POI recommendation

This paper focuses on the task of Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation whose goal is to generate a list of POIs for a target user based on his or her history check-in records. Different from the traditional recommendation tasks (e.g., movie recommendation), there are many factors, like temporal factor and geographical factor, which make a great influence on user preference. Though existing POI recommendation methods tend to model the user preference from temporal factor, geographical factor or social factor, they fail to model these factors into a jointly model, leading to learn the suboptimal user preference. To tackle this issue, we propose a Muti-channel Graph Attention Network (MGAN) for POI recommendation which learns the user preference from multiple aspects in a unify model. Specifically, MGAN first constructs several graphs with corresponding contextual features to capture the user preference from temporal, geographical, semantic and social aspects. Then MGAN leverages the graph attention networks to learn the representations of POIs from these graphs. Finally, MGAN estimates the user preference from the history check-in records and other similar users via the learned POI representations. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets. And the results indicate that our proposed MGAN outperforms mainstream POI recommendation methods.