Title
Trust Evaluation in Online Social Networks Using Generalized Network Flow
Abstract
In online social networks (OSNs), to evaluate trust from one user to another indirectly connected user, the trust evidence in the trusted paths (i.e., paths built through intermediate trustful users) should be carefully treated. Some paths may overlap with each other, leading to a unique challenge of path dependence, i.e., how to aggregate the trust values of multiple dependent trusted paths. OSNs bear the characteristic of high clustering, which makes the path dependence phenomenon common. Another challenge is trust decay through propagation, i.e., how to propagate trust along a trusted path, considering the possible decay in each node. We analyze the similarity between trust propagation and network flow, and convert a trust evaluation task with path dependence and trust decay into a generalized network flow problem. We propose a modified flow-based trust evaluation scheme GFTrust, in which we address path dependence using network flow, and model trust decay with the leakage associated with each node. Experimental results, with the real social network data sets of Epinions and Advogato, demonstrate that GFTrust can predict trust in OSNs with a high accuracy, and verify its preferable properties.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1109/TC.2015.2435785
IEEE Trans. Computers
Keywords
Field
DocType
generalized network flow,online social networks (osns),path dependence,trust decay,trust evaluation
Flow network,Trusted path,Social network,Algorithm design,Computer science,Computer network,Path dependence,Cluster analysis
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
PP
99
0018-9340
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
27
0.69
18
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wenjun Jiang135624.25
Jie Wu28307592.07
Feng Li3270.69
Guojun Wang443747.52
Huanyang Zheng513617.00