CityHood: An Explainable Travel Recommender System for Cities and Neighborhoods

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.