Mobile Networks and Applications

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-019-01241-7

QoS Prediction for Service Recommendation with Deep Feature

Learning in Edge Computing Environment
Yuyu Yin 1,2 & Lu Chen 1 & Yueshen Xu 3,4 & Jian Wan 2,5 & He Zhang 3 & Zhida Mai 6

# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract
Along with the popularity of intelligent services and mobile services, service recommendation has become a key task, especially
the task based on quality-of-service (QoS) in edge computing environment. Most existing service recommendation methods have
some serious defects, and cannot be directly adopted in edge computing environment. For example, most of existing methods
cannot learn deep features of users or services, but in edge computing environment, there are a variety of devices with different
configurations and different functions, and it is necessary to learn deep features behind those complex devices. In order to fully
utilize hidden features, this paper proposes a new matrix factorization (MF) model with deep features learning, which integrates a
convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed mode is named Joint CNN-MF (JCM). JCM is capable of using the learned
deep latent features of neighbors to infer the features of a user or a service. Meanwhile, to improve the accuracy of neighbors
selection, the proposed model contains a novel similarity computation method. CNN learns the neighbors features, forms a
feature matrix and infers the features of the target user or target service. We conducted experiments on a real-world service dataset
under a batch of cases of data densities, to reflect the complex invocation cases in edge computing environment. The experi-
mental results verify that compared to counterpart methods, our method can consistently achieve higher QoS prediction results.

Keywords Service recommendation . QoS prediction . Edge computing . Deep feature learning . Convolutional neural network .
Matrix factorization

1 Introduction decentralized architecture, and are processed by local comput-

At present, many information technologies, such as cloud com-
puting, big data, Internet-of-things, mobile computing and ar-
tificial intelligence, are being widely applied [1, 2].
Meanwhile, as an emerging technique, edge computing is de-
veloping fast [3]. In edge computing, services are provided in a
ing devices in priority, such as local computers, smart phones
or sensors [4]. Such a trend promotes the rapid development of
services in three directions (i.e., intelligence, personalization
and integration), and spawns a large number of new services.
At the same time, due to the large number of available services,
it is a difficult task for a user to select services that match his or

* Yueshen Xu 1
School of Computer, Hangzhou Dianzi University,
ysxu@xidian.edu.cn Hangzhou 310018, China
2
Yuyu Yin Key Laboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation of
yinyuyu@hdu.edu.cn Ministry of Education, Hangzhou 310018, China
3
Lu Chen School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University,
chenlu@hdu.edu.cn Xi’an 710126, China
Jian Wan 4
Provincial Key Laboratory for Computer Information Processing
wanjian@hdu.edu.cn Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, Jiangsu, China
He Zhang 5
zhh@stu.xidian.edu.cn School of Information and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang
University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China
Zhida Mai
6
top.mark@e-live.cn Xanten Guangdong Development Co., Ltd, Foshan 528200, China

her requirements. So it is an urgent task to solve how to rec-
ommend suitable services to meet users’ requirements, espe-
cially in edge computing environment.
Service recommendation technique is the key to finish per-
sonalization for intelligent services. The service recommenda-
tion task is to recommend services that can meet the functional
requirements of users, and also requires that the recommended
services should meet the non-functional requirements (quali-
ty-of- service, QoS for short), especially for those services
with the same or similar functions. However, in a real service
invocation scenario, the number of services that a user has
invoked before is usually quite limited, resulting in a serious
lack of historical QoS values. Such a case is also serious in
edge computing environment. Therefore, in order to carry out
intelligent service recommendation, it becomes an inevitable
task to predict missing QoS values in high accuracy.
In recent years, researches on QoS prediction have received
extensive attention both in academia and in industry [5]. Among
all prediction methods, the methods extended from collaborative
filtering (CF) have been deeply studied and applied, mainly be-
cause of its simplicity and effectiveness. The basic CF method
does not depend on structural information of the recommended
task, and can achieve good prediction accuracy. The CF-based
prediction methods can be divided into two categories, i.e.,
neighborhood-based methods and model-based methods [6].
The neighborhood-based method uses historical QoS records to
compute the similarity between users or services, to form the
neighbors set, and then computes missing QoS values by utiliz-
ing historical QoS records of neighbors. The prediction accuracy
of CF-based methods depends on the quality of neighbors selec-
tion, but in the case of high data sparsity, the quality of neighbor
selection becomes a bottleneck due to the limited available his-
torical QoS records [7]. Model-based methods use historical QoS
records to learn latent features in service invocation process, and
obtain the prediction results with the learned features. Model-
based methods do not depend on neighbors selection. Under high
data sparsity, it has been verified that the prediction accuracy of
model-based methods is usually better than that of
neighborhood-based methods [8].
Matrix factorization (MF for short) [9] is a widely-studied
model-based CF method. Matrix factorization assumes that the
QoS value of a service invocation is determined by several
hidden factors. For example, QoS is easily affected by network
condition or geographical location. In MF-based methods, user
QoS records and service QoS records are mapped to a common
latent feature space to learn and obtain prediction results [10]. It
has been verified that MF-based models can obtain more accu-
rate prediction results than neighborhood-based method.
However, note that, MF-based method is not capable of learn-
ing deep features of users and services, as MF is a shallow
model. In MF, features are designed manually, and the scalabil-
ity is very limited, which in turn leads to a decline in prediction
accuracy [11, 12].
Mobile Netw Appl
In recent years, deep learning has made great progress in
learning deep hidden features in many artificial intelligence
tasks, such as image recognition, text mining and natural lan-
guage processing [13–15]. In those tasks, convolutional neu-
ral network (CNN for short) is particularly prominent.
Recently, CNN has been also applied in recommendation sys-
tems [16], but its prediction results are not competitive
enough.
To attack the exiting problems, in this paper, we propose a
new neighborhood feature learning method, and further pro-
pose a novel MF model, which combines the advantages of
neighborhood-based method, model-based method and deep
learning technique. The proposed model can achieve high
accuracy in neighbors selection under high data sparsity
and is capable of learning deep features. First, the proposed
model is inspired by the neighborhood-based method. The
historical invocation QoS values of neighbors are key to the
prediction of the target invocation QoS, as the invocation
features of neighbors can be used to infer the target invoca-
tion features. Therefore, this paper proposes to use the neigh-
bors features to compute the latent features of the target user,
enhancing the learning ability of matrix factorization.
Second, the traditional neighbors selection methods are easy
to lead to overestimation. This paper analyzes the invocation
preference in service invocation process and finds that if two
users invoke services that are not frequently invoked by oth-
er users, these two users tend to invoke more similar ser-
vices. Considering that in edge computing environment, the
invocations records among users or services are sparse, we
propose two new concepts, which are inverse invocation
frequency of users (IIFU for short) and inverse invocation
frequency of services (IIFS for short). IIFU and IIFS are used
to compute similarity, to obtain a more accurate neighbors
set. Finally, in order to learn deep features, the proposed
model integrates convolutional neural network (CNN) into
matrix factorization model. We employ CNN to learn deep
features from the invocation records of the selected neigh-
bors, and also learn the relationship with features of the
target user or target service. The missing QoS values are
predicted with our model and the recommendation is con-
ducted subsequently.
The main contributions of this paper are as follows.
i. To promote the quality in neighbors selection in edge com-
puting environment, we propose two concepts, i.e., IIFU
(inverse invocation frequency of users) and IIFS (inverse
invocation frequency of services). The two new concepts
are extended to a new similarity computation method.
ii. This paper proposes a novel QoS prediction model with
neighbors feature learning, based on CNN and MF,
named Joint CNN-MF (JCM). The proposed JCM model
has a stronger ability than basic MF model in features
learning.
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iii. The experiments conducted in the real-world dataset
demonstrate that the proposed JCM model is superior
to the compared traditional and state-of-the-art methods
in prediction accuracy, and has high stability regarding
parameter settings.
The remaining sections of this paper are organized as fol-
lows. Section 2 summarizes the work related to QoS predic-
tion. Section 3 explains the whole framework. Section 4 elab-
orates the details of the proposed model. Section 5 gives the
experimental results, and Section 6 concludes the paper.
2 Related work
Many researches have been done in QoS prediction for Web
service or Web-based services, where most of the proposed
methods are extended from collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm
[17, 18]. The traditional CF algorithms can be classified into two
categories: neighborhood-based CF and model-based CF [6].
Neighborhood-based CF algorithms usually have the ad-
vantages of easy implementation and high scalability, and are
also widely used in QoS prediction [19]. Zheng et al. [20]
introduced a similarity computation method for improving
the similarity computation of similar neighbors. Yao et al.
[21] integrated content features into collaborative filtering.
The authors analyzed the description content of Web services
and used semantic analysis technique to learn the preferences
of users’ invocation. Xin et al. [22] established a location-
aware hidden Markov model, which utilized the geographical
information. Ren et al. [23] proposed a support vector ma-
chine (SVM) based CF method, which filtered the services
that might not be truly preferred by a user. Although the
neighborhood-based CF methods can finish the prediction
task, it cannot effectively solve the problem in high data spar-
sity. Besides, the existing methods are not specific for edge
computing environment.
Model-based CF methods have received wide attention in
recent years, especially in high data sparsity [24]. As an over-
whelming model-based method, matrix factorization (MF for
short) has attracted a lot of attention [10]. Chen et al. [24]
proposed an MF model combining with the knowledge of
geographical neighborhoods, which could alleviate the cold-
start problem. To better characterize the QoS data, Xu et al.
[25] introduced the probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF)
method into service recommendation. He et al. [26] proposed
a location-based hierarchical matrix factorization model
(HMF) to preform QoS prediction.
Li et al. [27] found that the existing methods ignored the
text information associated with services, and proposed a
QoS-aware service recommendation method utilizing text fea-
tures. Zhou [28] et al. integrated the user’s network location
information into MF model. Zhou et al. [29] proposed to add
time factors into QoS prediction, and built a time-user-service
tensor to perform tensor factorization. At that time, there were
some problems existing in the proposed methods, such as too
many parameters and slow convergence speed. Wu et al. [30]
proposed an improved prediction method named CAP
(Credibility-Aware Prediction), which was based on clustering
algorithm. Tian [31] collected a dataset containing a large
number of user-service invocation records, and proposed a
model that combined implicit feedbacks. Although many
studies have improved the prediction accuracy from a series
of aspects, the existing methods have a serious limitation that
only the shallow features are extracted or learned. The existing
methods that are purely based on neighborhood computation
or matrix factorization are not capable of learning deep fea-
tures that impact QoS values.
In recent years, deep neural networks emerge as effective
models in deep feature extraction, and some researchers have
tried to apply neural networks in recommendation systems
[16], especially the convolutional neural network (CNN). Tuan
et al. [32] proposed to combine session clicks and content fea-
tures to generate recommendations, using CNN. Xing et al. [33]
proposed a convolutional matrix factorization model, jointly
modeling user profiles, social relationships and geographical lo-
cation. Huan et al. [34] proposed a content-based MF-CNN joint
model that exploited text contents in recommendations, especial-
ly in solving the cold-start problem. Similarly, Kim et al. [16] also
proposed a content-aware recommendation model that were also
constructed based on CNN. Compared to the pure CF or MF
methods, the neural networks methods achieve better perfor-
mance in traditional recommender systems. However, there are
rarely methods proposed for QoS prediction, service recommen-
dation or service selection, and the existing methods in traditional
recommender systems cannot be directly used in edge comput-
ing. The reason is that in edge computing, QoS is determined by
physical configurations in user side, service side and network
link, but ratings in e-commerce are determined by users
preference.
In this paper, we propose a joint MF and CNN model,
which takes full advantage of neighborhood features, common
latent features and deep latent features of the service invoca-
tion process. The proposed model solves the problems of how
to improve neighbors selection quality and how to learn deep
latent features from QoS records. Based on the observation of
service invocation records, we propose two new concepts, i.e.,
IIFU (inverse invocation frequency of users) and IIFS (inverse
invocation frequency of services), and propose a new similar-
ity computation method based on IIFU and IIFS, to improve
neighbors selection quality As for feature learning, our model
extends convolutional neural network to learn deep latent fea-
tures of user neighbors and service neighbors. Matrix factor-
ization model is performed to predict missing QoS values. The
proposed model improves the ability in high data sparsity, and
improves the prediction accuracy.

3 The whole framework
In order to recommend high-quality services to users in edge
computing environment, this paper focuses on achieving high-
ly accurate QoS prediction. To this end, this paper proposes a
QoS prediction method based on deep feature learning, as
shown in Fig. 1.
Because of the sparsity problem and characteristics of tra-
ditional shallow models, the pure MF model cannot obtain
deep features. To alleviate the sparsity issue, the model ex-
ploits to use the neighbor features to learn the latent features of
the target user. At the same time, to learn deep latent features,
the proposed model combines a convolutional neural network,
which is named Joint CNN-MF model (JCM for short). As for
neighbors selection and neighbors feature learning, the proce-
dure is as follows.
1. Neighbors selection. First, we compute the inverse invo-
cation frequency of users (IIFU) for each service, and
IIFU takes the role of the weight for that service. We also
compute the inverse invocation frequency of services
(IIFS) for each user, and IIFS is as the weight for that user.
IIFU and IIFS are integrated into Euclidean distance to
compute the similarity between two users or two services,
and the neighbors set is formed according to the computed
similarities.
2. Neighbor features learning. The selected neighbors are
collected to form a neighbors feature matrix, which will
be reconstructed by CNN, and finally be factorized to
predict the missing values.
4 QoS prediction with neighbors feature
learning
This section gives a detailed explanation of our proposed joint
CNN and MF model (JCM for short), which is based on
neighbors feature learning.
Fig. 1 The whole framework for QoS prediction in edge computing
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4.1 Matrix factorization model with neighbors feature
learning
Due to the high sparsity and limitations of shallow models, the
latent feature learning in pure MF is not accurate enough. In
this paper, we propose to combine the convolutional neural
network and matrix factorization to learn deep latent features.
The convolutional operation is used to learn deep neighbors
features and reshape MF model using deep latent features. A
new matrix factorization model is constructed, named joint
CNN-MF (JCM for short).
Different from the traditional MF model, the feature matrix
in joint CNN-MF is reconstructed according to neighbors fea-
tures. Therefore, the first key step is to obtain the reconstruct-
ed user feature matrix and service feature matrix, which are
denoted as P' and Q', and the user- service QoS matrix is
denoted as R. The objective is to fit the product of the two
matrices to R.
0
R≈P ðQ0 Þ
T
ð1Þ
To obtain P' and Q', it is assumed that there are a number of
M users and N services. In matrix factorization, the matrix R
(M × N) is decomposed into two low-dimensional matrices,
i.e., user feature matrix P (M × F) and services feature matrix
Q (N × F), where F denotes the number of features.
Features learning requires neighbors similarities and selec-
tion, but the traditional Euclidean distance suffers from over-
estimation problem. In this paper, we propose two measures,
inverse invocation frequency of users (IIFU) and inverse in-
vocation frequency of services (IIFS), to improve similarity
computation. After that, the most similar K neighbors of a user
or service are selected, and the neighbors set of user u is
notated as N'(u) and neighbors set of service i is notated as
N'(i).
Based on the neighbors set, the neighbor feature matrix can
be constructed. The construction of user neighbors set is
shown in Fig. 3, and the obtained neighbors feature matrix is
0
notated as PvN ðuÞ , and the construction of service neighbors set
N 0 ðiÞ
is similar, and is notated as Q j , where v ∈ N'(u), j ∈ N'(i).
Mobile Netw Appl

Fig. 2 Matrix factorization (MF) services features services

model

users
users features

User-service QoS Two feature matrices

matrix

With convolutional operation, latent features are learned where α is the learning rate, and the loss function gradually
for every user neighbors feature matrix, and every service decreases along with iterations, so as to achieve the optimiza-
neighbors feature matrix, and the reconstructed feature matrix tion. The iterative process is repeated until convergence, and
is as follows. the prediction result is
2 3 2 3 0
^qu;i ¼ Pu ⋅ðQi 0 Þ
T
L L ð6Þ
P ¼ 4 P ½u 5; Q ¼ 4 Q ½i 5
0 0 0 0
ð2Þ
L L

The reconstructed feature matrices P' and Q' are composed 4.2 Similarity computation
of feature vectors Pu' and Qi', which are learned by stochastic
gradient descent algorithm. As the traditional selection of neighbors has overestimation
Finally, to fit the matrix R by the product of P' and Q', a loss problem, we propose an improved similarity computation
function L is built to minimize the predicted errors. method, which is enhanced by inverse invocation frequency
 0 0 M N   of users (IIFU) and inverse invocation frequency of services
T 2
L P ; Q ¼ min ∑ ∑ qu;i −Pu 0 ⋅ðQi 0 Þ ð3Þ (IIFS). The similarity between users is computed by the ser-
u¼1 i¼1
vices that they both invoke. IIFU of service i (λi) is computed
where qu, i is the QoS value of service i invoked by user u. In with
optimization of L, Pu' and Qi' are solved by stochastic gradient
juj
descent, which are conducted as follows. λi ¼ log ð7Þ
jui j
0 0 ∂L
Pu ¼ Pu −α 0 ð4Þ where ∣u∣ is the total number of users, and ∣ui∣ is the number
∂Pu
of users who have invoked service i. A higher IIFU of service i
0 0 ∂L indicates a higher discrimination of service i. Similar to IIFU,
Qi ¼ Qi −α 0 ð5Þ
∂Qi the inverse invocation frequency of services (IIFS, λu) is

Fig. 3 User feature matrix and features

neighbors feature matrix
Features
N(u)

users N(u) neighbors

N(u)

User feature matrix P Neighbors feature matrix PN'(u)

 Mobile Netw Appl

jij 4.3 Neighbors feature learning

λu ¼ log
jiu j
where ∣ i ∣ is the total number of services, and ∣iu∣ represents
the number of services invoked by user u. Similarly, a higher
value of λu means a higher discrimination of user u. Using
IIFS of user u as the weight, the proposed similarity is based
on Euclidean distance, and is computed as
1 features. In our model, the convolutional layer receives feature
S u;v ¼ vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u M    2
u matrices PNv ðuÞ generated by neighbors of user u and Q j
u∑ qu;i −qu − qv;i −qv ⋅λi
t generated by neighbors of service i. Assuming that there are n
1 þ i¼0
jM j
where Su, v is the similarity between user u and user v. To
model the common behavior in service invocation, we build
a co-invoked services set M = Mu ∩ Mv, which is the set of
services invoked by both user u and user v. Mu denotes the
set of services invoked by user u and Mv denotes the set of
services invoked by user v.qu, i is the real QoS value generated
after the target service i is invoked by the target user u, and qv, i
is the real QoS value of the target service i. To prevent the
denominator from being 0, we add 1 in denominator. qu is the
average QoS value of user u, and qv is the average QoS value
of user v. The computation of service similarity is similar to
that of users, and is computed with
1
S i; j ¼ vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u N    2
u Sigmoid ðxÞ ¼
u∑ qu;i −qi − qu; j −q j ⋅λu
t
1 þ i¼0
jN j
where N = Ni ∩ Nj is the set of users that have invoked service
i and service j before, qi is the average QoS of service i, and q j
is the average QoS value of service j. Ni is the set of users that
have invoked service i before, and Nj is the set of users that
have invoked service j before. Following similarity results, the
top K most similar neighbors are selected to form the neigh-
bors set N'(u) of user u, and the neighbors set N'(i) of service i.
ð8Þ
In our model, the convolutional operation is to learn deep fea-
tures from the neighbors feature matrix, and further construct
user feature matrix or service feature matrix. Figure 4 shows a
4-layer convolutional network architecture, containing input
layer, convolution layer, pooling layer and output layer.
The convolutional layer is the core of CNN, and is used for
convolutional computation of input features and learning key
ð9Þ
0 N 0 ðiÞ
neurons in convolutional layer, each neuron nt performs
convolutional computation on inputs by sliding convolutional
kernel C nt , and obtains a new set of features. The convolution
kernel is also known as a filter. In convolution computation,
each convolutional kernel slides along the width and height of
input data, and computes the inner product of the entire
convolutional kernel and the input data. Taking user side as
an example. Assuming that the size of convolutional kernel is
s and C nt ∈Rss , the feature map represented by nt is obtained by
 0 
gnt ¼ f PvN ðuÞ *C nt þ bv ; v∈N ðuÞ ð11Þ
where the operator ∗ represents the convolutional computation,
and bv represents the offset. f is a sigmoid function, and is used
to transform vectors to a value in the range of 0 to 1.
ð10Þ
1
ð12Þ
1 þ e−x
The convolutional layer is followed by a pooling layer,
which is used to reduce the dimension of features learned by
the convolutional layer, retaining more important features, and
can also alleviate the overfitting issue. Assuming that the fea-
ture map obtained in convolutional layer is
n o
G ¼ g n1 ; gn2 ; …; g nt ; …; gnz−sþ1 . We adopt the maximum
pooling method, that is, the maximum value in G is taken to
represent the pooling result, which is shown as follows.

Fig. 4 Neighbors feature learning

in convolutional neural network

Input Layer Convolutional Pooling Layer Output Layer

(neighbors feature matrix) Layer (deep feature vector)
Mobile Netw Appl

Table 1 Dataset statistics QoS prediction. Therefore, it is more credible for performance
Number of users 339 comparison among different methods. Table 1 presents the
dataset details.
Number of services 5828
Number of service invocation 1,974,675 5.2 Metric
Number of countries where users are located 30
Number of countries where services are located 73 We evaluate the performance of methods using two metrics,
Average response time 0.81 S including mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square
error (RMSE). A smaller MAE means higher prediction ac-
curacy. MAE is computed as follows.
h      i
d ¼ max g n1 ; max gn2 ; …; max gnz−sþ1 ð13Þ 1
MAE ¼ ∑ jq −^ ^q j ð16Þ
N u;i∈M t u;i u;i
The output layer follows the pooling, and converts the
high-order features obtained by the pooling layer into user- RMSE represents the standard deviation of prediction er-
feature vectors of fixed dimensions, which are obtained by rors, and is computed as
sigmoid function. sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
1  2
0
P ½ u  ¼ f ð wu d u þ b u Þ ð14Þ RMSE ¼ ∑ qu;i −^ ^qu;i ð17Þ
N u;i∈M t
where P'[u] is the feature vector of user u, du is the output of
where Mt denotes the test set and N is the number of QoS
pooling, wu is the weight, and bu is an offset. Similarly, the
values in test set Mt. qui represents the real QoS value, while
feature vector of service i can be computed in the same way as
^qui represents the corresponding prediction QoS value. A
0
Q ½i ¼ f ðwi d i þ bi Þ ð15Þ smaller RMSE means higher prediction accuracy.

5.3 Training set and test set

5 Experiments and evaluation
5.1 Dataset
WSDream dataset [35] is used in our experiments. WSDream
contains 5825 services and 339 users, including two types of
QoS, i.e., response time and throughput. In this paper, we
conducted the experiments on response time dataset, as this
dataset has been widely used in performance evaluation for
In real service invocation environment, the QoS records are
usually highly sparse. Users typically only have invoked a
very small number of services, which leads to the limited
overlapping of the same service invocation among users. To
evaluate our method in real service invocation environment, a
part of QoS values are randomly selected from the whole
response time set as training set, and the remaining response
time values form the test set. In this paper, 8 different training
sets with different densities are formed, and the data densities

Table 2 Prediction accuracy

comparison in low data densities Model d = 5% d = 10% d = 15% d = 20%
(A smaller value means a better
performance) MAE RMSE MAE RMSE MAE RMSE MAE RMSE

UserMean 0.8715 1.8586 0.8734 1.8561 0.8758 1.8537 0.8792 1.8561

ItemMean 0.7426 1.5776 0.7282 1.5485 0.7115 1.5306 0.7005 1.5308
UPCC 0.7695 1.6940 0.7201 1.6101 0.6521 1.4959 0.5921 1.3993
IPCC 0.7326 1.6346 0.7125 1.5439 0.6783 1.4104 0.6503 1.3109
WSRec 0.6794 1.4884 0.6211 1.4265 0.6037 1.3684 0.6020 1.3515
LFM 0.5783 1.5010 0.5644 1.3201 0.5438 1.2719 0.5350 1.2269
SN-MF 0.6318 1.3968 0.5377 1.2695 0.5008 1.2264 0.4871 1.2073
LE-MF 0.5734 1.3703 0.5136 1.2511 0.4827 1.2041 0.4646 1.1809
LR-MF 0.5516 1.4151 0.4785 1.2576 0.4460 1.2128 0.4340 1.1422
JCF 0.5132 1.3328 0.4665 1.2505 0.4504 1.1854 0.4365 1.1802
 Mobile Netw Appl

Table 3 Prediction accuracy

comparison in high data densities Model d = 30% d = 50% d = 70% d = 90%
(A smaller value means a better
performance) MAE RMSE MAE RMSE MAE RMSE MAE RMSE

UserMean 0.8688 1.8351 0.8775 1.8594 0.8774 1.8660 0.8727 1.8418

ItemMean 0.6825 1.5290 0.6746 1.5046 0.6749 1.5182 0.6806 1.5262
UPCC 0.5861 1.5028 0.6077 1.6207 0.5628 1.4737 0.5639 1.3791
IPCC 0.6316 1.4724 0.5865 1.6184 0.5439 1.4704 0.6687 1.4173
WSRec 0.4800 1.3424 0.4652 1.2712 0.4312 1.2058 0.4169 1.1324
LFM 0.4767 1.3511 0.4212 1.2501 0.4018 1.1514 0.3848 1.1015
JCF 0.4295 1.1746 0.4069 1.1488 0.3897 1.1157 0.3783 1.0894

d are 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 30%, 50%, 70% and 90%, respec-
tively. Take the training set with a density of 10% as an ex-
ample. We randomly select 10% QoS values from the whole
response time dataset as the training set. The remaining 90%
data form the test set to test the prediction accuracy of the
proposed model. Considering that, the prediction results ob-
tained after a single round of experiment do not have enough
credibility in model comparison. Therefore, we performed 10
times of experiments on each density case (5%, 10%, 15%,
20%, 30%, 50%, 70% and 90%), and report the average pre-
diction results.
5.4 Performance comparison
To give a comprehensive performance comparison, we com-
pare our model with the following widely-used or state-of-the-
art methods, and conduct a series of comparative experiments
on different training sets with different densities. The com-
pared methods are present as follows, and the results are given
in Table 2 and Table 3.
1. UserMean. UserMean predicts missing values by com-
puting the known average QoS value of each user.

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 5 Impact of f under different data densities
Mobile Netw Appl
2. ItemMean. ItemMean predicts the missing values by
computing the known average QoS value of each service.
3. UPCC (User Pearson Correlation Coefficient). UPCC
borrows the idea from user-based collaborative filtering
algorithm, which uses Pearson correlation coefficient to
compute the similarity between two users [36].
4. IPCC (Item Pearson Correlation Coefficient). IPCC bor-
rows the idea from item-based collaborative filtering al-
gorithm, which also uses Pearson correlation coefficient
to compute the similarity between two items [37].
5. WSRec (Web Service Recommendation). WSRec per-
forms a linear combination of prediction results of
UPCC and IPCC [35].
6. LFM (Latent Factor Model). LFM performs dimensional
reduction of the QoS matrix to learn latent features of
users and services, and predicts results based on the
learned latent features [9].
7. SN-MF (Service Neighbors-based MF). SN-MF proposes
a new method for selecting neighbors of each service, and
further combines latent features of service neighbors into
matrix factorization model [38].
(a)
(c)
Fig. 6 Impact of K under different data densities
8. LE-MF (Location-Enhanced MF). LE-MF integrates geo-
graphical information and trust mechanism into traditional
matrix factorization model to predict QoS values [39].
9. LR-MF (Location and Reputation-aware MF). LR-MF uses
reputation information combined with matrix factorization to
discover hidden features and make predictions [40].
From Tables 2 and 3, we can have the following
observations.
1. Our model JCF achieves the lowest errors in all cases of
data densities, including low data densities and high data
densities. It indicates that JCF model can better handle the
high sparsity problem, which is a serious issue in real-
world scenario of service invocation. Also, it can be in-
ferred that JCF model has high applicability and can be
employed in many cases of service invocation.
2. The proposed JCF model behaves better than the com-
pared neighborhood-based methods, such as UPCC and
IPCC, and also behaves better than the compared model-
(b)
(d)

based methods. Such an advantage verifies the effective-
ness of the proposed framework, including similarity
computation, built model and features learning technique.
3. Along with the data densities increasing, the prediction
errors become smaller. The reason is that more training
QoS records can promote the accuracy of similarity com-
putation, and also promote the quality of learned features
in neighbors feature learning. With promoted similarity
results and features, JCF model will generate more accu-
rate prediction results.
5.5 Sensitivity analysis of parameters
5.5.1 Impact of f
In our proposed method, the parameter f determines the num-
ber of latent features. In this section, we study the impact of f
on prediction results, and the value of f changes from 10 to
100 with an increment of 10. Other parameters are set accord-
ing to default parameter setting. The impact of f on MAE and
RMSE under different data densities is presented in Fig. 5.
As shown in Fig. 5, as the number of features increases,
both MAE and RMSE gradually decrease. At the case of data
densities being 5% and 10%, when f exceeds 50, MAE and
RMSE tend to be stable. In contrast, at the case of densities
being 15% and 20%, when f exceeds 70, MAE and RMSE
tend to be stable.
5.5.2 Impact of K
The parameter K determines the number of neighbors. We
conduct the sensitivity analysis of K in the value range of 10
to 50 with a constant increment of 10. The data density varies
from 5% to 90%, and a lower density means less available
training data. We report the experimental results of MAE and
RMSE, which are present in Fig. 6.
As it can be seen from Fig. 6, with the increase of K, MAE
and RMSE results slightly decline in the beginning, and rise
also slightly after K reaches a certain threshold. The reason for
errors rising is that as the number of neighbors increases, some
unreliable neighbors will be included, lowering the quality of
neighbors selection. In the whole range of values, it can be
seen that the performance of our model changes slightly, and
is not sensitive to different values of K.
6 Conclusion and future work
This paper proposed a QoS prediction method for services
recommendation in edge computing environment, with deep
feature learning. Using CNN, the proposed model learned the
deep latent features of neighbors, both in user side and service
Mobile Netw Appl
side. We also proposed an effective way to integrate the
learned deep features into MF model, and constructed a com-
prehensive prediction framework. The experimental results on
the real-world dataset demonstrated that compared to the tra-
ditional and state-of-the-art methods, our model achieved con-
sistently higher accuracy, both in low data densities and high
data densities. We also conducted parameter sensitivity
experiments.
Although the advantages of CNN have been widely used in
various fields, there are still some deficiencies requiring fur-
ther research, such as how to integrate time factors into CNN.
As in edge computing, the configurations and running status
of devices probably are not stable, and may change along with
environment changing. We will continuously improve our
model in future.
Acknowledgements This paper is supported by the National Key
Research and Development Program of China (No.2017YFB1400601),
National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61872119, No.
61702391), Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (No.
LY16F020017) and Shaanxi Province (No.2018JQ6050), and
Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (JBX171007).
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