CityHood: An Explainable Travel Recommender System for Cities and Neighborhoods

TL;DR

CityHood is an interactive, explainable travel recommendation system that suggests cities and neighborhoods based on user interests, using large-scale reviews and socio-cultural data to provide transparent, personalized suggestions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system combining interest modeling, multi-scale analysis, and explainability for location-based travel recommendations.

Findings

Effective personalization of city and neighborhood suggestions.

Use of LIME for explainability in travel recommendations.

Enhanced user engagement through transparent reasoning.

Abstract

We present CityHood, an interactive and explainable recommendation system that suggests cities and neighborhoods based on users' areas of interest. The system models user interests leveraging large-scale Google Places reviews enriched with geographic, socio-demographic, political, and cultural indicators. It provides personalized recommendations at city (Core-Based Statistical Areas - CBSAs) and neighborhood (ZIP code) levels, supported by an explainable technique (LIME) and natural-language explanations. Users can explore recommendations based on their stated preferences and inspect the reasoning behind each suggestion through a visual interface. The demo illustrates how spatial similarity, cultural alignment, and interest understanding can be used to make travel recommendations transparent and engaging. This work bridges gaps in location-based recommendation by combining a kind of interest modeling, multi-scale analysis, and explainability in a user-facing system.