Web service selection algorithm based on principal component analysis

Existing Web service selection approaches usually assume that preferences of users have been provided in a quantitative form by users. However, due to the subjectivity and vagueness of preferences, it may be impractical for users to specify quantitative and exact preferences. Moreover, due to that Quality of Service (QoS) attributes are often interrelated, existing Web service selection approaches which employ weighted summation of QoS attribute values to compute the overall QoS of Web services may produce inaccurate results, since they do not take correlations among QoS attributes into account. To resolve these problems, a Web service selection framework considering user’s preference priority is proposed, which incorporates a searching mechanism with QoS range setting to identify services satisfying the user’s QoS constraints. With the identified service candidates, based on the idea of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), an algorithm of Web service selection named PCA-WSS (Web Service Selection based on PCA) is proposed, which can eliminate the correlations among QoS attributes and compute the overall QoS of Web services accurately. After computing the overall QoS for each service, the algorithm ranks the Web service candidates based on their overall QoS and recommends services with top QoS values to users. Finally, the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach are validated by experiments, i.e. the selected Web service by our approach is given high average evaluation than other ones by users and the time cost of PCA-WSS algorithm is not affected acutely by the number of service candidates.