Smart Imputation, Better Recommendations: Improving Traditional Point-of-Interest Recommendation through Data Augmentation

Data sparsity is a persistent challenge in recommender systems, especially in specific domains like Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation, where it significantly impacts model performance. While classical recommender systems have used various imputation and data augmentation mechanisms to address d...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Sánchez, Pablo, Bellogin Kouki, Alejandro
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Repositorio:Biblos-e Archivo. Repositorio Institucional de la UAM
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:biblosearchi::c51c6d5b510f760179ad2999a7e1b348
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10486/775460
https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3744347
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Point-Of-Interest
Imputation
Temporal evaluation
Informática
Descripción
Sumario:Data sparsity is a persistent challenge in recommender systems, especially in specific domains like Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation, where it significantly impacts model performance. While classical recommender systems have used various imputation and data augmentation mechanisms to address data sparsity, these methods have not been extensively explored in the POI recommendation domain. In this work, we propose a generic imputation framework to study the use of data augmentation techniques to generate synthetic check-ins and analyze their effects on the POI recommendation scenario. Our main goal is to enhance the performance of various traditional recommenders by increasing the training set interactions, considering specific characteristics of the domain, such as geographical information. We apply these techniques in six different cities from a global Foursquare check-in dataset, as well as in two additional cities from the Gowalla dataset, and a separate dataset from Yelp, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation across multiple data sources. Our imputation approach evidences improvements for most models. In several cases, these improvements exceeded 100% for ranking accuracy, measured in terms of nDCG, without considerably compromising novelty or diversity. Data and code are released at https://github.com/pablosanchezp/ImputationForPOIRecsys