Effective User Preference Clustering in Web Service Applications

Abstract

Abstract The research on personalized recommendation of Web services plays an important role in the field of Web services technology applications. Fortunately, not all users have completely different service preferences. Due to the same application scenarios and personal interests, some users have the same preferences for certain types of Web services. This paper explores the problem of user clustering in the service environment, grouping users according to their service preferences. It helps service providers to identify and characterize the preferences of similar users and provide them with customized services. We propose two combination-based clustering algorithms which make full use of the advantages of the K-means algorithm and the affinity propagation algorithm. In addition, a three-stage clustering process is elaborated to improve the accuracy of user clustering. To reduce the time complexity of the algorithms, we create a parallel execution model of the algorithms implemented by a higher-order MapReduce sequence linking technology. Extensive experiments on simulated datasets and real datasets are performed on the comparisons between the proposed algorithms and the other combination-based clustering algorithms. The experimental results substantiate that the proposed algorithms can effectively distinguish user group with different preferences.