  Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is a critical task in
location-based social networks, yet remains challenging due to a high degree of
variation and personalization exhibited in user movements. In this work, we
explore the latent hierarchical structure composed of multi-granularity
short-term structural patterns in user check-in sequences. We propose a
Spatio-Temporal context AggRegated Hierarchical Transformer (STAR-HiT) for next
POI recommendation, which employs stacked hierarchical encoders to recursively
encode the spatio-temporal context and explicitly locate subsequences of
different granularities. More specifically, in each encoder, the global
attention layer captures the spatio-temporal context of the sequence, while the
local attention layer performed within each subsequence enhances subsequence
modeling using the local context. The sequence partition layer infers positions
and lengths of subsequences from the global context adaptively, such that
semantics in subsequences can be well preserved. Finally, the subsequence
aggregation layer fuses representations within each subsequence to form the
corresponding subsequence representation, thereby generating a new sequence of
higher-level granularity. The stacking of encoders captures the latent
hierarchical structure of the check-in sequence, which is used to predict the
next visiting POI. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate
that the proposed model achieves superior performance whilst providing
explanations for recommendations. Codes are available at
https://github.com/JennyXieJiayi/STAR-HiT.
