MSP-RNN: Multi-Step Piecewise Recurrent Neural Network for Predicting the Tendency of Services Invocation.

Driven by the widespread application of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), an increasing number of services and mashups have been developed and published onto the Internet in the past decades. With the number keeping on burgeoning, predicting the tendency of services invocation will provide various roles in service ecosystems with promising opportunities. However, services invocation bear three unique characteristics, which give rise to difficulties in predicting them. First, enormous services show different and complicated traits, like periodicity, nonlinearity and nonstationarity. Second, services providing similar or compensatory functions make up intricate relationship. Third, the combination dependencies between mashups and their comprising component services further amplify the difficulty. Given these factors, we have developed a tailored model Multi-Step Piecewise Recurrent Neural Network (MSP-RNN) to predict the tendency of services invocation. In MSP-RNN, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) units are used to extract universal features. Based on these features, we have developed a piecewise regressive mechanism to make prediction discriminatingly. Besides, we have developed a multi-step prediction strategy to further enhance prediction accuracy and robustness. Extensive experiments in real-world data set with interpretable analysis show that MSP-RNN predicts the tendency of services invocation more accurately, i.e., by 3.7 percent in terms of symmetric mean absolute percentage error (SMAPE), than state-of-the-art baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]