Enhancing Long-and Short-Term Representations for Next POI Recommendations via Frequency and Hierarchical Contrastive Learning

Next POI recommendation aids users in predicting their destinations of interest and plays an increasingly vital role in location-based social services. Recent works focus on analyzing both long-term and short-term interests in POI recommendation to gain a deeper understanding of user profiles. However, these methods for modeling long-term user’s sequences primarily rely on the Transformer model, which functions as a low-pass filter, often leading to the loss of high-frequency information. Additionally, long-term and short-term sequences are typically modeled independently, with short-term sequences often defined solely by the most recent check-ins, overlooking their interactions and dependencies. Therefore, we propose Enhancing Long-and Short-Term Representations for Next POI Recommendations via Frequency and Hierarchical Contrastive Learning (FHCRec). FHCRec captures both high-frequency and low-frequency information in long-term sequences to model richer long-term user’s preference representations. Moreover, it harnesses the characteristics of the short-term subsequences embedded within long-term sequences to enhance short-term preference characterization via local and global hierarchical contrastive learning, resulting in more personalized short-term preferences. The enhanced long-term and short-term preferences are integrated to improve model recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.