Trust-aware location recommendation in location-based social networks: A graph-based approach


Canturk D., KARAGÖZ P., Kim S., TOROSLU İ. H.

Expert Systems with Applications, vol.213, 2023 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 213
  • Publication Date: 2023
  • Doi Number: 10.1016/j.eswa.2022.119048
  • Journal Name: Expert Systems with Applications
  • Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, PASCAL, Aerospace Database, Applied Science & Technology Source, Communication Abstracts, Computer & Applied Sciences, INSPEC, Metadex, Public Affairs Index, Civil Engineering Abstracts
  • Keywords: Location-based social networks, Trust-aware recommendation, Trust score prediction, Heterogeneous graph, Information fusion, Random walk
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

© 2022 Elsevier LtdWith the increase in the use of mobile devices having location-related capabilities, the use of Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN) has also increased, allowing users to share location-embedded information with other users in the social network. By leveraging check-in activities provided by LBSNs, personalized recommendations can be provided. Trust is an important concept in social networks to improve recommendation quality. In this work, we develop a method for predicting the trust scores of LBSN users and propose a trust-aware recommendation technique, TLoRW, to recommend locations to users based on their previous check-ins, the social network, and predicted trust scores of users. In the proposed model, global trust score of user is generated on the basis of check-in history. In addition to trust, spatial context is anther important aspect of TLoRW to generate location recommendations based on the current location of a user. The proposed algorithm runs on a contextual subgraph rather full graph, relaxing the computing resource requirement. We represent a given LBSN with a undirected graph model. Recommendation scores of the locations are generated as the result of the random walk performed on the trust augmented LBSN subgraph. A comprehensive evaluation of TLoRW is conducted by comparing its recommendation performance against baseline techniques, as well as state-of-the-art trust-aware recommendation approaches in the literature, based on benchmark datasets. The experiments reveal that the trust information incorporated into random-walk-based approach improves the accuracy of the recommended locations @5 by minimum 5%.