Intention-Oriented Itinerary Recommendation Through Bridging Physical Trajectories and Online Social Networks

Compared with traditional itinerary planning, intention-oriented itinerary recommendations can provide more flexible activity planning without requiring the user's predetermined destinations and is especially helpful for those in unfamiliar environments. The rank and classification of points of interest (POI) from location-based social networks (LBSN) are used to indicate different user intentions. The mining of vehicles' physical trajectories can provide exact civil traffic information for path planning. This paper proposes a POI category-based itinerary recommendation framework combining physical trajectories with LBSN. Specifically, a Voronoi graph-based GPS trajectory analysis method is utilized to build traffic information networks, and an ant colony algorithm for multi-object optimization is implemented to locate the most appropriate itineraries. We conduct experiments on datasets from the Foursquare and GeoLife projects. A test of users' satisfaction with the recommended items is also performed. Our results show that the satisfaction level reaches an average of 80%.