In location-based social networks (LBSNs), extensive user check-in data incorporating user preferences for location is collected through Internet of Things devices, including cell phones and other sensing devices. However, directly acquiring the preferences of spars users remains an open challenge. This article offers a point-of-interest (POI) category recommendation model based on group preferences (PPCM). This model is proposed for three reasons: 1) because data influence the training of a deep learning model, the group influence of users is taken into account. To protect the privacy of users' check-in records and classify similar users into the same group, locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is used; 2) a successive POI category recommendation model should capture the long- and short-term dependence ability. The attention mechanism and a temporal sliding window are paired with the long short-term memory (LSTM). This paradigm is useful for efficiently mining users' long-term dependencies and interests; and 3) although the overall users' check-in data are vast, check-in location options are also massive for a single user. There is a scarcity of data that may be utilized to mine user interests. Thus, instead of using POI, we leverage the POI category to better mine the user's interests. On real check-in data sets from New York City and Tokyo, the PPCM is compared to other models. The comparison results indicate that the PPCM has improved recommendation performance.