PREMERE: Meta-Reweighting via Self-Ensembling for Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has become an important research topic in these days. The user check-in history used as the input to POI recommendation is very imbalanced and noisy because of sparse and missing check-ins. Although sample reweighting is commonly adopted for addressing this challenge with the input data, its fixed weighting scheme is often inappropriate to deal with different characteristics of users or POIs. Thus, in this paper, we propose PREMERE, an adaptive weighting scheme based on meta-learning. Because meta-data is typically required by meta-learning but is inherently hard to obtain in POI recommendation, we self-generate the meta-data via self-ensembling. Furthermore, the meta-model architecture is extended to deal with the scarcity of check-ins. Thorough experiments show that replacing a weighting scheme with PREMERE boosts the performance of the state-of-the-art recommender algorithms by 2.36–26.9% on three benchmark datasets.