Magellan: A Personalized Travel Recommendation System Using Transaction Data

We present Magellan - a personalized travel recommendation system that is built entirely from card transaction data. The data logs contain extensive metadata for each transaction between a user and a merchant. We describe the procedure employed to extract travel itineraries from such transaction data. Unlike traditional approaches, we formulate the recommendation problem into two steps: (1) predict coarse granularity information such as location and category of the next merchant; and (2) provide fine granularity individual merchant recommendations based on the predicted location and category. The breakdown helps us build a scalable recommendation system. We propose a quadtree-based algorithm that provides an adaptive spatial resolution for the location classes in our first step while also reducing the class-imbalance across various location labels. Finally, we propose a novel neural architecture, SoLEmNet, that implicitly learns the inherent class label hierarchy and achieves a higher performance on our dataset compared to previous baselines.