Context-Aware QoS Prediction with Neural Collaborative Filtering for Internet-of-Things Services

With the prevalent application of Internet of Things (IoT) in real world, services have become a widely used means of providing configurable resources. As the number of services is large and is also increasing fast, it is an inevitable mission to determine the suitability of a service to a user. Two typical tasks are needed, which are service recommendation and service selection. The prediction for Quality of Service (QoS) is an important way to accomplish the two tasks, and there have been a series of methods proposed to predict QoS values. However, few methods have been used to study the QoS prediction in IoT environments, where contextual information is vital. In this article, we develop a holistic framework to attack the QoS prediction in the IoT environment, which is based on neural collaborative filtering (NCF) and fuzzy clustering. We design a fuzzy clustering algorithm that is capable of clustering contextual information and then propose a new combined similarity computation method. Next, a new NCF model is designed that can leverage local and global features. Sufficient experiments are implemented on two real-world data sets, and the experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.