Neural and Attentional Factorization Machine-Based Web API Recommendation for Mashup Development

The wide adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has driven the creation of a massive amount of applications on the Internet, which includes the popular Mashups composed from multiple existing Web APIs. The availability of a large number of Web APIs with diverse functionalities on the Web makes it difficult for users to find APIs meeting their needs for Mashup development. To relieve this difficulty, recommending Web APIs for Mashup development has become an effective solution. A dozen of service recommendation approaches were proposed based on multi-dimensional features extracted from the service repository over the last couple of years, e.g., similarity based matching methods, matrix factorization based models, and factorization machine based models. Among these existing works, Factorization Machine (FM) based models, in particular the deep learning based FM models, have shown better performance compared with other conventional collaborative filtering techniques. Despite their superiority, the deep learning based FMs still have some strong model assumptions that can harm the recommendation accuracy. For example, it models factorized interactions with the same weight and ignores the non-linear and complex inherent structure in data. In a real-world service recommendation scenario, different predictor variables usually have different predictive power and not all features are predictable for estimating the target. Also, higher-order feature interactions are usually underlain in complex user-service environments. To address these deficiencies, this paper proposes a hybrid factorization machine model with a novel neural network architecture, named NAFM, which integrates a deep neural network to capture the non-linear and complex feature interactions and uses an attention mechanism to capture the varying importance of feature interactions. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on a real-world dataset from ProgrammableWeb. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models for service recommendation.