TPMCF: Temporal QoS Prediction Using Multi-Source Collaborative Features

The e-commerce industry has seen significant growth in recent years due to the introduction of new web service APIs. Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters, which are fundamental for assessing service performance, have become crucial in evaluating services in the competitive market. Since QoS parameters can vary among users and change over time, accurate QoS predictions have become essential for users when selecting the most suitable services. Existing methods for predicting temporal QoS have hardly achieved the desired accuracy, beset by challenges like data sparsity, the presence of anomalies, and the inability to capture intricate temporal user-service interactions. Although some recent approaches, particularly those founded on recurrent neural network-based sequential architectures, endeavor to model temporal relationships in QoS data, they grapple with performance degradation due to the omission of other pivotal features, such as collaborative relationships and spatial characteristics of users and services. Furthermore, the uniform attention among features across all time-steps can thwart progress in predictive accuracy. This paper addresses these challenges and proffers a scalable strategy for temporal QoS prediction using multi-source collaborative features that not only furnishes heightened responsiveness but also engenders enhanced prediction accuracy. The method amalgamates collaborative features stemming from both users and services, capitalizing on the user-service relationship. Additionally, it integrates spatio-temporal auto-extracted features through the orchestration of graph convolution and a specialized variant of the transformer encoder equipped with multi-head self-attention. The proposed approach has been validated on the WSDREAM-2 benchmark datasets, and the results of these extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework surpasses major state-of-the-art methods in terms of predictive accuracy, all the while upholding robust scalability and reasonable responsiveness.