LARS: A Location-Aware Recommender System

• Main Authors: Levandoski, J. J., Sarwat, M., Eldawy, A., Mokbel, M. F.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Collaboration; Computational modeling; Maintenance engineering; Merging; Motion pictures; Recommender systems; Scalability
• ISSN: 1063-6382; 2375-026X
• DOI: 10.1109/ICDE.2012.54

This paper proposes LARS, a location-aware recommender system that uses location-based ratings to produce recommendations. Traditional recommender systems do not consider spatial properties of users nor items, LARS, on the other hand, supports a taxonomy of three novel classes of location-based ratings, namely, spatial ratings for non-spatial items, non-spatial ratings for spatial items, and spatial ratings for spatial items. LARS exploits user rating locations through user partitioning, a technique that influences recommendations with ratings spatially close to querying users in a manner that maximizes system scalability while not sacrificing recommendation quality. LARS exploits item locations using travel penalty, a technique that favors recommendation candidates closer in travel distance to querying users in a way that avoids exhaustive access to all spatial items. LARS can apply these techniques separately, or in concert, depending on the type of location-based rating available. Experimental evidence using large-scale real-world data from both the Foursquare location-based social network and the Movie Lens movie recommendation system reveals that LARS is efficient, scalable, and capable of producing recommendations twice as accurate compared to existing recommendation approaches.