Time-Aware API Popularity Prediction via Heterogeneous Features

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which are emerging web services in general, are increasing with a rapid speed in recent years. With so many APIs, many management platforms have been developed and deployed, leading to the boom of API markets, that are similar to the mobile App markets. Meanwhile, it has become more and more difficult to select and manage APIs. In reality, most existing management platforms typically recommend currently popular APIs to developers. However, the fact that popularity of API varies over time is ignored in those platforms, leading to the difficulty of recommending APIs that are just released but may be popular in the near future. To tackle this challenge, an approach of predicting the popularity of APIs is proposed in this paper. Predicting the popularity of API can not only be used for API ranking, recommendation and selection, but also make it more convenient for API providers and consumers to manage or select API respectively. In this paper, we propose a time-aware linear model to predict the API popularity, using time series feature of APIs and API´s self-features such as its´ provider ranking and description features, which are called heterogeneous features in our paper. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on a real-world Programmable Web dataset with 613 real APIs. The experimental results show that our model has a better performance, when compared with some other state-of-the-art prediction models.