A Hybrid Approach to Web Service Recommendation Based on QoS-Aware Rating and Ranking

As the number of Web services with the same or similar functions increases steadily on the Internet, nowadays more and more service consumers pay great attention to the non-functional properties of Web services, also known as quality of service (QoS), when finding and selecting appropriate Web services. For most of the QoS-aware Web service recommendation systems, the list of recommended Web services is generally obtained based on a rating-oriented prediction approach, aiming at predicting the potential ratings that an active user may assign to the unrated services as accurately as possible. However, in some application scenarios, high accuracy of rating prediction may not necessarily lead to a satisfactory recommendation result. In this paper, we propose a ranking-oriented hybrid approach by combining the item-based collaborative filtering and latent factor models to address the problem of Web services ranking. In particular, the similarity between two Web services is measured in terms of the correlation coefficient between their rankings instead of between the traditional QoS ratings. Besides, we also improve the measure NDCG (Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain) for evaluating the accuracy of the top K recommendations returned in ranked order. Comprehensive experiments on the QoS data set composed of real-world Web services are conducted to test our approach, and the experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms other competing approaches.