Outlier-Resilient Web Service QoS Prediction

The proliferation of Web services makes it difficult for users to select the most appropriate one among numerous functionally identical or similar service candidates. Quality-of-Service (QoS) describes the non-functional characteristics of Web services, and it has become the key differentiator for service selection. However, users cannot invoke all Web services to obtain the corresponding QoS values due to high time cost and huge resource overhead. Thus, it is essential to predict unknown QoS values. Although various QoS prediction methods have been proposed, few of them have taken outliers into consideration, which may dramatically degrade the prediction performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose an outlier-resilient QoS prediction method in this paper. Our method utilizes Cauchy loss to measure the discrepancy between the observed QoS values and the predicted ones. Owing to the robustness of Cauchy loss, our method is resilient to outliers. We further extend our method to provide time-aware QoS prediction results by taking the temporal information into consideration. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on both static and dynamic datasets. The results demonstrate that our method is able to achieve better performance than state-of-the-art baseline methods.Comment: 12 pages, to appear at the Web Conference (WWW) 202

Comparing time series with machine learning-based prediction approaches for violation management in cloud SLAs

© 2018 In cloud computing, service level agreements (SLAs) are legal agreements between a service provider and consumer that contain a list of obligations and commitments which need to be satisfied by both parties during the transaction. From a service provider's perspective, a violation of such a commitment leads to penalties in terms of money and reputation and thus has to be effectively managed. In the literature, this problem has been studied under the domain of cloud service management. One aspect required to manage cloud services after the formation of SLAs is to predict the future Quality of Service (QoS) of cloud parameters to ascertain if they lead to violations. Various approaches in the literature perform this task using different prediction approaches however none of them study the accuracy of each. However, it is important to do this as the results of each prediction approach vary according to the pattern of the input data and selecting an incorrect choice of a prediction algorithm could lead to service violation and penalties. In this paper, we test and report the accuracy of time series and machine learning-based prediction approaches. In each category, we test many different techniques and rank them according to their order of accuracy in predicting future QoS. Our analysis helps the cloud service provider to choose an appropriate prediction approach (whether time series or machine learning based) and further to utilize the best method depending on input data patterns to obtain an accurate prediction result and better manage their SLAs to avoid violation penalties

An effective scheme for QoS estimation via alternating direction method-based matrix factorization

Accurately estimating unknown quality-of-service (QoS) data based on historical records of Web-service invocations is vital for automatic service selection. This work presents an effective scheme for addressing this issue via alternating direction method-based matrix factorization. Its main idea consists of a) adopting the principle of the alternating direction method to decompose the task of building a matrix factorization-based QoS-estimator into small subtasks, where each one trains a subset of desired parameters based on the latest status of the whole parameter set; b) building an ensemble of diversified single models with sophisticated diversifying and aggregating mechanism; and c) parallelizing the construction process of the ensemble to drastically reduce the time cost. Experimental results on two industrial QoS datasets demonstrate that with the proposed scheme, more accurate QoS estimates can be achieved than its peers with comparable computing time with the help of its practical parallelization.This work was supported in part by the FDCT (Fundo para o Desenvolvimento das Ciências e da Tecnologia) under Grant119/2014/A3, in part by the National Natu-ral Science Foundation of China under Grant 61370150, and Grant 61433014; in part by the Young Scientist Foun-dation of Chongqing under Grant cstc2014kjrc-qnrc40005; in part by the Chongqing Research Program of Basic Re-search and Frontier Technology under Grant cstc2015jcyjB0244; in part by the Postdoctoral Science Funded Project of Chongqing under Grant Xm2014043; in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 106112015CDJXY180005; in part by the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Pro-gram of Higher Education under Grant 20120191120030

TPMCF: Temporal QoS Prediction using Multi-Source Collaborative Features

Recently, with the rapid deployment of service APIs, personalized service recommendations have played a paramount role in the growth of the e-commerce industry. Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters determining the service performance, often used for recommendation, fluctuate over time. Thus, the QoS prediction is essential to identify a suitable service among functionally equivalent services over time. The contemporary temporal QoS prediction methods hardly achieved the desired accuracy due to various limitations, such as the inability to handle data sparsity and outliers and capture higher-order temporal relationships among user-service interactions. Even though some recent recurrent neural-network-based architectures can model temporal relationships among QoS data, prediction accuracy degrades due to the absence of other features (e.g., collaborative features) to comprehend the relationship among the user-service interactions. This paper addresses the above challenges and proposes a scalable strategy for Temporal QoS Prediction using Multi-source Collaborative-Features (TPMCF), achieving high prediction accuracy and faster responsiveness. TPMCF combines the collaborative-features of users/services by exploiting user-service relationship with the spatio-temporal auto-extracted features by employing graph convolution and transformer encoder with multi-head self-attention. We validated our proposed method on WS-DREAM-2 datasets. Extensive experiments showed TPMCF outperformed major state-of-the-art approaches regarding prediction accuracy while ensuring high scalability and reasonably faster responsiveness.Comment: 10 Pages, 7 figure