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POI (point of interest) recommender systems for location-based social network services, such as Foursquare or Yelp,have gained tremendous popularity in the past few years.Much work has been dedicated into improving recommenda-tion services in such systems by integrating different featuresthat are assumed to have an impact on people’s preferencesfor POIs, such as time and geolocation. Yet, little atten-tion has been paid to the impact of weather on the users’final decision to visit a recommended POI. In this paper wecontribute to this area of research by presenting the firstresults of a study that aims to predict the POIs that userswill visit based on weather data. To this end, we extend thestate-of-the-art Rank-GeoFM POI recommender algorithmwith additional weather-related features, such as tempera-ture, cloud cover, humidity and precipitation intensity. Weshow that using weather data not only significantly increasesthe recommendation accuracy in comparison to the origi-nal algorithm, but also outperforms its time-based variant.Furthermore, we present the magnitude of impact of eachfeature on the recommendation quality, showing the need tostudy the weather context in more detail in the light of POIrecommendation systems.

Social information such as stated interests or geographic check-insin social networks has shown to be useful in many recommendertasks recently. Although many successful examples exist, not muchattention has been put on exploring the extent to which social im-pact is useful for the task of recommending sellers to buyers in vir-tual marketplaces. To contribute to this sparse field of research wecollected data of a marketplace and a social network in the virtualworld of Second Life and introduced several social features andsimilarity metrics that we used as input for a user-basedk-nearestneighbor collaborative filtering method. As our results reveal, mostof the types of social information and features which we used areuseful to tackle the problem we defined. Social information suchas joined groups or stated interests are more useful, while otherssuch as places users have been checking in, do not help much forrecommending sellers to buyers. Furthermore, we find that some ofthe features significantly vary in their predictive power over time,while others show more stable behaviors. This research is rele-vant for researchers interested in recommender systems and onlinemarketplace research as well as for engineers interested in featureengineering.