Web service recommendation based on time‐aware users clustering and multi‐valued QoS prediction

Abstract

SummaryWith the growing number of functionally similar services over the Internet, recommendation techniques become a natural choice to cope with the challenging task of optimal service selection, and to help consumers satisfy their needs and preferences. However, most existing models on service recommendation are static, while in the real world, the perception and popularity of Web services may continually change. Time is becoming an increasingly important factor in recommender systems since time effects influence users' preferences to a large extent. In order to help users with this problem, we propose a time‐aware Web service recommendation system. First, we use K‐means clustering method in order to exclude the less similar users, which share few common Web services with the active user at different times. Slope One algorithm is also adopted in order to deal with data sparsity problem by predicting the missing ratings over time. Then, a recommendation algorithm is presented in order to recommend the top‐rated Web services. Experiments proved the accuracy of our approach compared to five existing solutions.