Location Aware Deep Collaborative Filtering for Service Recommendation

With the widespread application of service-oriented architecture (SOA), a flood of similarly functioning services have been deployed online. How to recommend services to users to meet their individual needs becomes the key issue in service recommendation. In recent years, methods based on collaborative filtering (CF) have been widely proposed for service recommendation. However, traditional CF typically exploits only low-dimensional and linear interactions between users and services and is challenged by the problem of data sparsity in the real world. To address these issues, inspired by deep learning, this article proposes a new deep CF model for service recommendation, named location-aware deep CF (LDCF). This model offers the following innovations: 1) the location features are mapped into high-dimensional dense embedding vectors; 2) the multilayer-perceptron (MLP) captures the high-dimensional and nonlinear characteristics; and 3) the similarity adaptive corrector (AC) is first embedded in the output layer to correct the predictive quality of service. Equipped with these, LDCF can not only learn the high-dimensional and nonlinear interactions between users and services but also significantly alleviate the data sparsity problem. Through substantial experiments conducted on a real-world Web service dataset, results indicate that LDCF's recommendation performance obviously outperforms nine state-of-the-art service recommendation methods.