MNCF: Prediction Method for Reliable Blockchain Services under a BaaS Environment

Abstract

Blockchain is an innovative distributed ledger technology that is widely used to build next-generation applications without the support of a trusted third party. With the ceaseless evolution of the service-oriented computing (SOC) paradigm, Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) has emerged, which facilitates development of blockchain-based applications. To develop a high-quality blockchain-based system, users must select highly reliable blockchain services (peers) that offer excellent quality-of-service (QoS). Since the vast number of blockchain services leading to sparse QoS data, selecting the optimal personalized services is challenging. Hence, we improve neural collaborative filtering and propose a QoS-based blockchain service reliability prediction algorithm under BaaS, named modified neural collaborative filtering (MNCF). In this model, we combine a neural network with matrix factorization to perform collaborative filtering for the latent feature vectors of users. Furthermore, multi-task learning for sharing different parameters is introduced to improve the performance of the model. Experiments based on a large-scale real-world dataset validate its superior performance compared to baselines.