Experimental Analysis of Friend-And-Native Based Location Awareness for Accurate Collaborative Filtering

Location-based recommender systems have gained a lot of attention in both commercial domains and research communities where there are various approaches that have shown great potential for further studies. However, there has been little attention in previous research on location-based recommender systems for generating recommendations considering the locations of target users. Such recommender systems sometimes recommend places that are far from the target user’s current location. In this paper, we explore the issues of generating location recommendations for users who are traveling overseas by taking into account the user’s social influence and also the native or local expert’s knowledge. Accordingly, we have proposed a collaborative filtering recommendation framework called the Friend-And-Native-Aware Approach for Collaborative Filtering (FANA-CF), to generate reasonable location recommendations for users. We have validated our approach by systematic and extensive experiments using real-world datasets collected from Foursquare TM. By comparing algorithms such as the collaborative filtering approach (item-based collaborative filtering and user-based collaborative filtering) and the personalized mean approach, we have shown that our proposed approach has slightly outperformed the conventional collaborative filtering approach and personalized mean approach.