EviRec: Continual Evidence Learning for Dual Cold-Start POI Recommendation
TL;DR
EviRec is proposed, a continual evidence-learning framework that estimates how much historical evidence should be trusted separately for each candidate POI, and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with the largest gains concentrated on cold-start queries.
Abstract
Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is a core task in location-based services, yet most existing methods assume a fixed user population and POI catalog. Through a large-scale data-driven analysis of 10 U.S. cities, we identify substantial POI churn, user turnover, category drift, and decay in static POI memory, motivating the study of continual dual cold-start POI recommendation. To address this setting, we propose EviRec, a continual evidence-learning framework that estimates how much historical evidence should be trusted separately for each candidate POI. EviRec scores each visible candidate from three complementary views: a matching view based on the user's recent mobility profile, a transition-memory view that captures repeated mobility routines, and a lifecycle view that reflects candidate maturity. Because a near-zero transition score may indicate either irrelevance or insufficient observation, EviRec qualifies the evidence using each candidate's observation state and applies a reliability gate to adaptively route between transition-memory and lifecycle evidence. We evaluate EviRec on a full-year, five-city POI check-in dataset containing more than 30,000 users and 684,200 trajectories. Experimental results show that EviRec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with the largest gains concentrated on cold-start queries. In particular, EviRec improves NDCG@10 by 20.4\% on Dual-New cases over the strongest baseline. In-depth analyses further confirm that these gains arise primarily from candidate-specific reliability gating while largely preserving previously learned mobility routines.
