A paper accepted in Expert Systems With Applications 2023

Title: Trust-Aware Location Recommendation in Location-Based Social Networks: A Graph-Based Approach
Author: Deniz CANTURK, Pinar Karagoz, Kim Sang-Wook, Ismail Hakki Toroslu
Abstract
With 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 recommendation systems can be built. Trust is an important concept in social networks to improve recommendation accuracy. In this work, we develop a method to predict trust scores of LBSN users and propose a 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 scores of users are generated on the basis of their check-in histories. Spatial context lies in the hearth 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 generated graph. A comprehensive evaluation of TLoRW is conducted by comparing its recommendation performance to 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%.