Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

The Self-Organizing Map

Quality of service (QoS) is widely employed for describing nonfunctional characteristics of web services. Although QoS of web services has been investigated intensively in the field of service computing, there is a lack of real-world web service QoS data sets for validating various QoS-based techniques and models. To investigate QoS of real-world web services and to provide reusable research data sets for future research, we conduct several large-scale evaluations on real-world web services. First, addresses of 21,358 web services are obtained from the Internet. Then, three large-scale real-world evaluations are conducted. In our evaluations, more than 30 million real-world web service invocations are conducted on web services in more than 80 countries by users from more than 30 counties. Detailed evaluation results are presented in this paper and comprehensive web service QoS data sets are publicly released online.

Investigating QoS of Real-World Web Services

Generating highly accurate predictions for missing quality-of-service (QoS) data is an important issue. Latent factor (LF)-based QoS-predictors have proven to be effective in dealing with it. However, they are based on first-order solvers that cannot well address their target problem that is inherently bilinear and nonconvex, thereby leaving a significant opportunity for accuracy improvement. This paper proposes to incorporate an efficient second-order solver into them to raise their accuracy. To do so, we adopt the principle of Hessian-free optimization and successfully avoid the direct manipulation of a Hessian matrix, by employing the efficiently obtainable product between its Gauss-Newton approximation and an arbitrary vector. Thus, the second-order information is innovatively integrated into them. Experimental results on two industrial QoS datasets indicate that compared with the state-of-the-art predictors, the newly proposed one achieves significantly higher prediction accuracy at the expense of affordable computational burden. Hence, it is especially suitable for industrial applications requiring high prediction accuracy of unknown QoS data.

Incorporation of Efficient Second-Order Solvers Into Latent Factor Models for Accurate Prediction of Missing QoS Data

Quality-of-service-based (QoS) service selection is an important issue of service-oriented computing. A common premise of previous research is that the QoS values of services to target users are supposed to be all known. However, many of QoS values are unknown in reality. This paper presents a neighborhood-based collaborative filtering approach to predict such unknown values for QoS-based selection. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method has three new features: 1) the adjusted-cosine-based similarity calculation to remove the impact of different QoS scale; 2) a data smoothing process to improve prediction accuracy; and 3) a similarity fusion approach to handle the data sparsity problem. In addition, a two-phase neighbor selection strategy is proposed to improve its scalability. An extensive performance study based on a public data set demonstrates its effectiveness.

Predicting Quality of Service for Selection by Neighborhood-Based Collaborative Filtering

Several approaches to web service selection and recommendation via collaborative filtering have been studied, but seldom have these studies considered the difference between web service recommendation and product recommendation used in e-commerce sites. In this paper, we present RegionKNN, a novel hybrid collaborative filtering algorithm that is designed for large scale web service recommendation. Different from other approaches, this method employs the characteristics of QoS by building an efficient region model. Based on this model, web service recommendations will be generated quickly by using modified memory-based collaborative filtering algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that apart from being highly scalable, RegionKNN provides considerable improvement on the recommendation accuracy by comparing with other well-known collaborative filtering algorithms.

RegionKNN: A Scalable Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Algorithm for Personalized Web Service Recommendation

With the proliferation of web services, effective QoS-based approach to service recommendation is becoming more and more important. Although service recommendation has been studied in the recent literature, the performance of existing ones is not satisfactory, since (1) previous approaches fail to consider the QoS variance according to users' locations; and (2) previous recommender systems are all black boxes providing limited information on the performance of the service candidates. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative filtering algorithm designed for large-scale web service recommendation. Different from previous work, our approach employs the characteristic of QoS and achieves considerable improvement on the recommendation accuracy. To help service users better understand the rationale of the recommendation and remove some of the mystery, we use a recommendation visualization technique to show how a recommendation is grouped with other choices. Comprehensive experiments are conducted using more than 1.5 million QoS records of real-world web service invocations. The experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.

Personalized QoS-Aware Web Service Recommendation and Visualization

Web services are integrated software components for the support of interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Web services have been widely employed for building service-oriented applications in both industry and academia in recent years. The number of publicly available Web services is steadily increasing on the Internet. However, this proliferation makes it hard for a user to select a proper Web service among a large amount of service candidates. An inappropriate service selection may cause many problems (e.g., ill-suited performance) to the resulting applications. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative filtering-based Web service recommender system to help users select services with optimal Quality-of-Service (QoS) performance. Our recommender system employs the location information and QoS values to cluster users and services, and makes personalized service recommendation for users based on the clustering results. Compared with existing service recommendation methods, our approach achieves considerable improvement on the recommendation accuracy. Comprehensive experiments are conducted involving more than 1.5 million QoS records of real-world Web services to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Xi Chen

Papers

RegionKNN: A Scalable Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Algorithm for Personalized Web Service Recommendation

Personalized QoS-Aware Web Service Recommendation and Visualization

Web Service Recommendation via Exploiting Location and QoS Information