A Tourist Attraction Recommendation Model Fusing Spatial, Temporal, and Visual Embeddings for Flickr-Geotagged Photos

The rapid development of social media data, including geotagged photos, has benefited the research of tourism geography; additionally, tourists’ increasing demand for personalized travel has encouraged more researchers to pay attention to tourism recommendation models. However, few studies have comprehensively considered the content and contextual information that may influence the recommendation accuracy, especially tourist attractions’ visual content due to redundant and noisy geotagged photos; therefore, we propose a tourist attraction recommendation model for Flickr-geotagged photos which fuses spatial, temporal, and visual embeddings (STVE). After spatial clustering and extracting visual embeddings of tourist attractions’ representative images, the spatial and temporal embeddings are modeled with the Word2Vec negative sampling strategy, and the visual embeddings are fused with Matrix Factorization and Bayesian Personalized Ranking. The combination of these two parts comprises our proposed STVE model. The experimental results demonstrate that our STVE model outperforms other baseline models. We also analyzed the parameter sensitivity and component performance to prove the performance superiority of our model.