How to accurately predict unknown quality-of-service (QoS) data based on observed ones is a hot yet thorny issue in Web service-related applications. Recently, a latent factor (LF) model has shown its efficiency in addressing this issue owing to its high accuracy and scalability. However, existing LF model-based QoS predictors mostly ignore the user/service neighborhoods, or reliability of given QoS data where noises commonly exist to cause accuracy loss. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a data-characteristic-aware latent factor (DCALF) model to implement highly accurate QoS predictions, where "data-characteristic-aware" indicates that it can appropriately implement QoS prediction according to the characteristics of given QoS data. Its main idea is two-fold: a) it detects the neighborhoods and noises of users and services based on the dense LFs extracted from the original sparse QoS data, b) it incorporates a density peaks-based clustering method into its modeling process for achieving the simultaneous detections of both neighborhoods and noises of QoS data. With such designs, it precisely represents the given QoS data in spite of their sparsity, thereby achieving highly accurate predictions for unknown ones. Results on two real datasets demonstrate that the proposed DCALF model outperforms state-of-the-art QoS predictors.

Recommender systems (RSs) commonly adopt a user-item rating matrix to describe users' preferences on items. With users and items exploding, such a matrix is usually high-dimensional and sparse (HiDS). Recently, the idea of deep learning has been applied to RSs. However, current deep-structured RSs suffer from high computational complexity. Enlightened by the idea of deep forest, this paper proposes a deep latent factor model (DLFM) for building a deep-structured RS on an HiDS matrix efficiently. Its main idea is to construct a deep-structured model by sequentially connecting multiple latent factor (LF) models instead of multilayered neural networks through a nonlinear activation function. Thus, the computational complexity grows linearly with its layer count, which is easy to resolve in practice. The experimental results on four HiDS matrices from industrial RSs demonstrate that when compared with state-of-the-art LF models and deep-structured RSs, DLFM can well balance the prediction accuracy and computational efficiency, which well fits the desire of industrial RSs for fast and right recommendations.

A recommender system (RS) is highly efficient in filtering people’s desired information from high-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) data. To date, a latent factor (LF)-based approach becomes highly popular when implementing a RS. However, current LF models mostly adopt single distance-oriented Loss like an $L_{2}$ norm-oriented one, which ignores target data’s characteristics described by other metrics like an $L_{1}$ norm-oriented one. To investigate this issue, this article proposes an $L_{1}$ -and- $L_{2}$ -norm-oriented LF ( $\text{L}^{3}\text{F}$ ) model. It adopts twofold ideas: 1) aggregating $L_{1}$ norm’s robustness and $L_{2}$ norm’s stability to form its Loss and 2) adaptively adjusting weights of $L_{1}$ and $L_{2}$ norms in its Loss. By doing so, it achieves fine aggregation effects with $L_{1}$ norm-oriented Loss ’s robustness and $L_{2}$ norm-oriented Loss ’s stability to precisely describe HiDS data with outliers. Experimental results on nine HiDS datasets generated by real systems show that an $\text{L}^{3}\text{F}$ model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in prediction accuracy for missing data of an HiDS dataset. Its computational efficiency is also comparable with the most efficient LF models. Hence, it has good potential for addressing HiDS data from real applications.

Online streaming feature selection (OSFS) has attracted extensive attention during the past decades. Current approaches commonly assume that the feature space of fixed data instances dynamically increases without any missing data. However, this assumption does not always hold in many real applications. Motivated by this observation, this study aims to implement online feature selection from sparse streaming features, i.e., features flow in one by one with missing data as instance count remains fixed. To do so, this study proposes a latent-factor-analysis-based online sparse-streaming-feature selection algorithm (LOSSA). Its main idea is to apply latent factor analysis to pre-estimate missing data in sparse streaming features before conducting feature selection, thereby addressing the missing data issue effectively and efficiently. Theoretical and empirical studies indicate that LOSSA can significantly improve the quality of OSFS when missing data are encountered in target instances.

Quality-of-Service (QoS), which describes the non-functional characteristics of Web service, is of great significance in service selection. Since users cannot invoke all services to obtain the corresponding QoS data, QoS prediction becomes a hot yet thorny issue. To date, a latent factor analysis (LFA)-based QoS predictor is one of the most successful and popular approaches to address this issue. However, current LFA-based QoS predictors are mostly modeled on inner product space with an L2-norm-oriented Loss function only. They cannot comprehensively represent the characteristics of target QoS data to make accurate predictions because inner product space and L2-norm have their respective limitations. To address this issue, this study proposes a Double-space and Double-norm Ensembled Latent Factor (D2E-LF) model. Its main idea is three-fold: 1) Double-space—inner product space and distance space are employed to model two kinds of LFA-based QoS predictors, respectively, 2) Double-norm—both of these two predictors adopt an L1-and-L2-norm-oriented Loss function, and 3) Ensembled—building an ensemble of these two predictors by a weighting strategy. By doing so, D2E-LF integrates multi-merits originating from inner product space, distance space, L1-norm, and L2-norm, making it achieve highly accurate QoS prediction. Experiments on two real-world QoS datasets demonstrate that D2E-LF has significantly higher prediction accuracy than state-of-the-art models.

Performing highly accurate representation learning on a high-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrix is of great significance in a big data-related application such as a recommender system. A latent factor (LF) model is one of the most efficient approaches to the HiDS matrix representation. However, an LF model’s representation learning ability relies heavily on an HiDS matrix’s known data density, which is extremely low due to numerous missing data entities. To address this issue, this work proposes a prediction-sampling-based multilayer-structured LF (PMLF) model with twofold ideas: 1) constructing a loosely connected multilayered LF architecture to increase the known data density of an input HiDS matrix by generating synthetic data layer by layer and 2) constraining this synthetic data generating process through a random prediction-sampling strategy and nonlinear activations to avoid overfitting. In the experiments, PMLF is compared with six state-of-the-art LF-and deep neural network (DNN)-based models on four HiDS matrices from industrial applications. The results demonstrate that PMLF outperforms its peers in well-balancing prediction accuracy and computational efficiency.