BGCL: Bi-subgraph network based on graph contrastive learning for cold-start QoS prediction

With the advent of Web service technologies, the number of services published on the cloud is increasing rapidly. The quality of service (QoS) becomes a crucial criterion for selecting services from a massive pool of candidates. Collaborative filtering (CF) has become a major way for personalized QoS prediction by leveraging historical interactions between users and services. Due to the increasing number of users and services, CF-based QoS prediction often suffers from data sparsity and cold-start difficulties. Inspired by the advantages of graph contrastive learning in cold-start predictions, we propose BGCL, a bi-subgraph network based on graph contrastive learning to solve the above problems. Firstly, we generate different perspectives of user-neighborhood and service-neighborhood sub-graphs based on sparse user–service bipartite graphs. Next, our model learns user and service embeddings using the graph contrastive learning and graph attention aggregation mechanisms on the generated sub-graphs. Finally, user and service embeddings are fed into a multi-layer perception to predict QoS values. Experimental results show that our model outperforms several existing models in terms of prediction accuracy.