Where Next? A Behavioral and Explainable Framework for City and Neighborhood Recommendation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding why individuals choose to visit particular cities and specific neighborhoods within them is essential for advancing both urban mobility research and personalized tourism technologies. This paper proposes a novel multi-level (city and neighborhood levels), explainable recommendation framework that models user interest based on area similarities across geographic, demographic, cultural, and venue-category dimensions. Our approach predicts user interest through a behaviorally informed, interpretable machine learning model. Using large-scale review data from Google Places, enriched with U.S. Census, political, and cultural indicators, we analyze mobility through the lens of high-interest and lowinterest divisions and two behavioral archetypes: returners (who repeatedly visit familiar areas) and explorers (who seek out new destinations). Results show that explorers are more interested in geographically clustered cities, suggesting a search for new experiences in nearby locations. In contrast, returners attach to areas that align with their past experiences (e.g., venue categories). Beyond good predictive performance, our system provides natural-language explanations for each recommendation, offering actionable insights into user behavior. A demonstration system illustrates how our approach enables transparent, behavior-informed travel recommendations. This work bridges gaps in urban AI by integrating spatial granularity, behavioral segmentation, and explainability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".