Trattner Christoph, Oberegger Alexander, Eberhard Lukas, Parra Denis, Marinho Leandro
2016
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.