HBGG: a Hierarchical Bayesian Geographical Model for Group Recommendation

Location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Plancast have gained increasing popularity. On those sites, users can organize and participate in group activities; hence, recommending venues to a group is of practical importance. In this paper, we study the problem of recommending venues to groups of users and propose a Hierarchical Bayesian Model (HBGG) for this purpose. First, a generative group geographical topic model (GG) which exploits group membership, group mobility regions and group preferences is proposed. And we integrate social structure into oneclass collaborative filtering as social-based collaborative filtering (SOCF) to leverage social wisdom. Through the shared latent group features, HBGG connects the group geographical model with SOCF framework for group recommendation. Experimental results on two real datasets show that our methods outperforms the state-of-the-art group recommenders, especially on cold-start user groups.