Contexts Enhance Accuracy: On Modeling Context Aware Deep Factorization Machine for Web API QoS Prediction

Service-oriented computing (SOC) promises a world of cooperating services loosely connected, constructing agile Web applications in heterogeneous environments conveniently. Web application interface (API) as an emerging technique attracts more and more enterprises and organizations to publish their deep computing functionalities and big data on the Internet, Web API has become the backbone to promote the development of SOC, thus forming the prosperous Web API economy. However, the number of available Web APIs on the Internet is massive and growing constantly, which causes the Web API overload problem. Quality of service (QoS) as an indicator is able to well differentiate the quality of Web APIs and has been widely applied for high quality Web API selection. Since testing QoS for massive Web APIs is resource-consuming, and the QoS performance depends on contextual information such as network and location, hence accurate QoS prediction has become very crucial for personalized Web API recommendation and high quality Web application construction. To address the above issue, this paper presents a context aware deep factorization machine model (CADFM for short) for accurate Web API QoS prediction. Specifically, we first carry out detailed data analysis using real-world QoS dataset and discover a positive relationship between QoS and contextual information, which motivates us to incorporate beneficial contexts for enhancing QoS prediction accuracy. Then, we treat QoS prediction as a regression problem and propose a context aware CADFM framework that integrates the contextual information via embedding technique. Particularly, we adopt MF and MLP for high-order and nonlinear interaction modeling, so as to learn the complex interaction between users and Web APIs accurately. Finally, the experimental results on real-world QoS dataset demonstrate that CADFM outperforms the classic and the state-of-the-art baselines, thereby generating the most accurate QoS predictions and increasing the revenue of Web APIs recommendation.