A Multiplex Hypergraph Attribute-Based Graph Collaborative Filtering for Cold-Start POI Recommendation

Within the scope of location-based services and personalized recommendations, the challenges of recommending new and unvisited points of interest (POIs) to mobile users are compounded by the sparsity of check-in data. Traditional recommendation models often overlook user and POI attributes, which exacerbates data sparsity and cold-start problems. To address this issue, a novel multiplex hypergraph attribute-based graph collaborative filtering is proposed for POI recommendation to create a robust recommendation system capable of handling sparse data and cold-start scenarios. Specifically, a multiplex network hypergraph is first constructed to capture complex relationships between users, POIs, and attributes based on the similarities of attributes, visit frequencies, and preferences. Then, an adaptive variational graph auto-encoder adversarial network is developed to accurately infer the users’/POIs’ preference embeddings from their attribute distributions, which reflect complex attribute dependencies and latent structures within the data. Moreover, a dual graph neural network variant based on both Graphsage K-nearest neighbor networks and gated recurrent units are created to effectively capture various attributes of different modalities in a neighborhood, including temporal dependencies in user preferences and spatial attributes of POIs. Finally, experiments conducted on Foursquare and Yelp datasets reveal the superiority and robustness of the developed model compared to some typical state-of-the-art approaches and adequately illustrate the effectiveness of the issues with cold-start users and POIs.