Optimal store placement aims to identify the optimal location for a new brick-and-mortar store that can maximize its sale by analyzing and mining users’ preferences from large-scale urban data. In recent years, the expansion of chain enterprises in new cities brings some challenges because of two aspects: (1) data scarcity in new cities, so most existing models tend to not work (i.e., overfitting), because the superior performance of these works is conditioned on large-scale training samples; (2) data distribution discrepancy among different cities, so knowledge learned from other cities cannot be utilized directly in new cities. In this article, we propose a task-adaptative model-agnostic meta-learning framework, namely, MetaStore, to tackle these two challenges and improve the prediction performance in new cities with insufficient data for optimal store placement, by transferring prior knowledge learned from multiple data-rich cities. Specifically, we develop a task-adaptative meta-learning algorithm to learn city-specific prior initializations from multiple cities, which is capable of handling the multimodal data distribution and accelerating the adaptation in new cities compared to other methods. In addition, we design an effective learning strategy for MetaStore to promote faster convergence and optimization by sampling high-quality data for each training batch in view of noisy data in practical applications. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method leads to state-of-the-art performance compared with various baselines.

Store site recommendation aims to predict the value of the store at candidate locations and then recommend the optimal location to the company for placing a new brick-and-mortar store. Most existing studies focus on learning machine learning or deep learning models based on large-scale training data of existing chain stores in the same city. However, the expansion of chain enterprises in new cities suffers from data scarcity issues, and these models do not work in the new city where no chain store has been placed (i.e., cold-start problem). In this article, we propose a unified approach for cold-start store site recommendation, Weighted Adversarial Network with Transferability weighting scheme (WANT), to transfer knowledge learned from a data-rich source city to a target city with no labeled data. In particular, to promote positive transfer, we develop a discriminator to diminish distribution discrepancy between source city and target city with different data distributions, which plays the minimax game with the feature extractor to learn transferable representations across cities by adversarial learning. In addition, to further reduce the risk of negative transfer, we design a transferability weighting scheme to quantify the transferability of examples in source city and reweight the contribution of relevant source examples to transfer useful knowledge. We validate WANT using a real-world dataset, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model over several state-of-the-art baseline models.