Toward a Systematic Evaluation Approach of Point Of Interest Recommendation Algorithms of a Novel Smart Tourism Tool

Abstract

Intelligent tourism can increase the interest of nomadic tourists in discovering new cities. However, many Points of Interest (POIs) are available, creating an information overload for tourists when choosing POIs to visit. For this reason, CARS (Context-Aware Recommendation Systems) can play an important role by exploiting the experiences of previous tourists and their contexts to recommend attractive POIs. Consequently, choosing the right POI recommendation algorithm (RA) for CARS is crucial because it involves the costly intervention of real tourists during the test phase. In order to make this phase more cost-effective, we can test several RAs simultaneously in order to assess their limitations in terms of cold start and tourist satisfaction. To compare these RAs, we propose in this article an approach called SEPRA (Systematic Evaluation for POI Recommendation Algorithms), which allows us to carry out an initial online evaluation of each tourist during their visit and a second offline evaluation of each CARS after the end of each POI path. To achieve this objective, we designed and implemented a new smart tourism tool that makes POI recommendations using two algorithms: the first is based on tourist/tourist similarity, and the second uses POI/POI similarity. These algorithms use memory-based collaborative filtering and are executed in parallel by our tool in the form of CARSs, incorporating time or weather as context variables. To evaluate these systems during their test phases, Our approach enables: (1) the calculation of prediction accuracy; (2) the examination of the relevance of the recommended POIs; and (3) the estimation of the acceptance rate of the recommendation process. Finally, the experimental results obtained with our approach show that the algorithm based on tourist similarity is more resistant to the cold start problem during the test phase and has a better satisfaction rate than the algorithm based on POI similarity.