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.

Non-negative latent factor (NLF) models can efficiently acquire useful knowledge from high-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrices filled with non-negative data. Single latent factor-dependent, non-negative and multiplicative update (SLF-NMU) is an efficient algorithm for building an NLF model on an HiDS matrix, yet it suffers slow convergence. A momentum method is frequently adopted to accelerate a learning algorithm, but it is incompatible with those implicitly adopting gradients like SLF-NMU. To build a fast NLF (FNLF) model, we propose a generalized momentum method compatible with SLF-NMU. With it, we further propose a single latent factor-dependent non-negative, multiplicative and momentum-incorporated update algorithm, thereby achieving an FNLF model. Empirical studies on six HiDS matrices from industrial application indicate that an FNLF model outperforms an NLF model in terms of both convergence rate and prediction accuracy for missing data. Hence, compared with an NLF model, an FNLF model is more practical in industrial applications.

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.

Non-negativity is vital for a latent factor (LF)-based model to preserve the important feature of a high-dimensional and sparse (HiDS) matrix in recommender systems, i.e., none of its entries is negative. Current non-negative models rely on constraints-combined training schemes. However, they lack flexibility, scalability, or compatibility with general training schemes. This work aims to perform unconstrained non-negative latent factor analysis (UNLFA) on HiDS matrices. To do so, we innovatively transfer the non-negativity constraints from the decision parameters to the output LFs, and connect them through a single-element-dependent mapping function. Then we theoretically prove that by making a mapping function fulfill specific conditions, the resultant model is able to represent the original one precisely. We subsequently design highly efficient UNLFA algorithms for recommender systems. Experimental results on four industrial-size HiDS matrices demonstrate that compared with four state-of-the-art non-negative models, a UNLFA-based model obtains advantage in prediction accuracy for missing data and computational efficiency. Moreover, such high performance is achieved through its unconstrained training process which is compatible with various general training schemes, on the premise of fulfilling non-negativity constraints. Hence, UNLFA algorithms are highly valuable for industrial applications with the need of performing non-negative latent factor analysis on HiDS matrices.

Neighborhood regularization is highly important for a latent factor (LF)-based Quality-of-Service (QoS)-predictor since similar users usually experience similar QoS when invoking similar services. Current neighborhood-regularized LF models rely prior information on neighborhood obtained from common raw QoS data or geographical information. The former suffers from low prediction accuracy due to the difficulty of constructing the neighborhood based on incomplete QoS data, while the latter requires additional geographical information that is usually difficult to collect considering information security, identity privacy, and commercial interests in real-world scenarios. To address the above issues, this work proposes a posterior-neighborhood-regularized LF (PLF) model for QoS prediction. The main idea is to decompose the LF analysis process into three phases: a) primal LF extraction, where the LFs are extracted to represent involved users/services based on known QoS data, b) posterior-neighborhood construction, where the neighborhood of each user/service is achieved based on similarities between their primal LF vectors, and c) posterior-neighborhood-regularized LF analysis, where the objective function is regularized by both the posterior-neighborhood of users/services and L2-norm of desired LFs. Experimental results from large scale QoS datasets demonstrate that PLF outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.