A two-stage location-sensitive and user preference-aware recommendation system

Abstract

Nowadays, cloud customers use cloud services increasingly to satisfy their demands. Usually, a significant number of customers are immature and inexpert and cannot express their needs accurately and numerically. They usually express their needs verbally and in the form of linguistic terms. On the other hand, the experienced customers express their needs numerically and accurately. In this situation, a recommendation system can be considered as one of the most useful ideas to support all type of customers. However, current recommendation systems (e.g., collaborative filtering based recommendations) meet customer requests that are accurately and numerically expressed. To support all types of customers, the construction of a strong recommendation system to analysis the demands expressed by customers (experienced and inexperienced) and to recommend suitable services is vital. As another important matter, cloud customers and services have been geographically distributed. Identifying the location of customers and services has a significant effect on the quality of services offered to customers. Therefore, the recommendation system should consider the location of customers and services in order to provide better services. In this paper, we introduce an efficient method to construct a powerful recommendation system which can provide suitable services considering the preferences of the customer and their location. The proposed recommendation system comprises two algorithms. The first algorithm is a fuzzy clustering algorithm, named FCA, that can well classify the location of customers and services. The second algorithm is an iterative adaptive neural-fuzzy algorithm, named IANFRA, which receives the preferences of the customer along with their location and identifies suitable services based on the locations clustered by FCA and the demands of customers (experienced and inexperienced). Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method has validated in terms of accuracy and scalability through conducting extensive experiments on a real distributed service quality dataset WS-DREAM. The evaluation results illustrate that both the service recommendation accuracy in the prediction of quality of services and the scalability, when the volume of the dataset is huge, have been improved.