Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Point of Interest Recommendation

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of location-based services, accurately recommending points of interest (POIs) has become a critical task. Although existing technologies are proficient in processing time-series data, they fall short when it comes to accommodating the diversity and dynamism in users' POI selections, particularly in extracting key signals from complex historical behaviors. To address this challenge, we introduced the Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Preprocessing Framework (HRL-PRP), a framework that can be integrated into existing recommendation models to effectively optimize user profiles. The HRL-PRP framework employs a two-tiered decision-making process, where the high-level process determines the necessity of modifying profiles, and the low-level process focuses on selecting POIs within the profiles. Through evaluations on multiple real-world datasets, we have demonstrated that HRL-PRP surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in various recommendation performance metrics.