GeoHostel: Location-based recommendation of hostels in the context of higher education through geospatial technology

Abstract

An efficient data management system is essential in the field of student housing to guarantee the availability of high-quality data that can make it easier to find appropriate hostels. Although recommender systems concerning hotels and tourism points of interest (POI) have been extensively researched, little attention has been paid to students housing in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). In this paper, we present GeoHostel, a novel location-based recommender system that combines real-time hostel availability data with Geographic Information System (GIS) technology. In contrast to traditional methods, GeoHostel is customized to meet the housing needs of Ghanaian students by fusing context-aware recommendation filtering with spatial features (distance to campus, safety, accessibility) to enhance decision-making. Evaluation metrics involving Precision, Recall, F-measure, MAE, and NMAE were used to compare GeoHostel with contemporary baseline methods to verify its efficacy through scientific benchmarking experiments. Evaluation results show that GeoHostel not only performs better than previous approaches but also offers a scalable, domain-specific, and socially significant solution for student housing in Ghana.