A strategy for trust propagation along the more trusted paths

The main goal of social networks are sharing and exchanging information among users. With the rapid growth of social networks on the Web, the most of interactions are conducted among unknown individuals. On the other hand, with increasing the biased behaviors in online communities, ability to assess the level of trustworthiness of a person before interacting with him has an important influence on users' decisions. Trust inference is a method used for this purpose. This paper studies propagating trust values along trust relationships in order to estimate the reliability of an anonymous person from the point of view of the user who intends to trust him/her. It describes a new approach for predicting trust values in social networks. The proposed method selects the most reliable trust paths from a source node to a destination node. In order to select the optimal paths, a new relation for calculating trustable coefficient based on previous performance of users in the social network is proposed. In ciao dataset there is a column called helpfulness. Helpfulness values represent previous performance of users in the social network. Advantages of this algorithm is its simplicity in trust calculation, using a new entity in dataset and its improvement in accuracy. The results of the experiments on Ciao dataset indicate that accuracy of the proposed method in evaluating trust values is higher than well-known methods in this area including TidalTrust, MoleTrust methods

A Survey on Trust Computation in the Internet of Things

Internet of Things defines a large number of diverse entities and services which interconnect with each other and individually or cooperatively operate depending on context, conditions and environments, produce a huge personal and sensitive data. In this scenario, the satisfaction of privacy, security and trust plays a critical role in the success of the Internet of Things. Trust here can be considered as a key property to establish trustworthy and seamless connectivity among entities and to guarantee secure services and applications. The aim of this study is to provide a survey on various trust computation strategies and identify future trends in the field. We discuss trust computation methods under several aspects and provide comparison of the approaches based on trust features, performance, advantages, weaknesses and limitations of each strategy. Finally the research discuss on the gap of the trust literature and raise some research directions in trust computation in the Internet of Things

Statistical relational learning with soft quantifiers

Quantification in statistical relational learning (SRL) is either existential or universal, however humans might be more inclined to express knowledge using soft quantifiers, such as ``most'' and ``a few''. In this paper, we define the syntax and semantics of PSL^Q, a new SRL framework that supports reasoning with soft quantifiers, and present its most probable explanation (MPE) inference algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, PSL^Q is the first SRL framework that combines soft quantifiers with first-order logic rules for modelling uncertain relational data. Our experimental results for link prediction in social trust networks demonstrate that the use of soft quantifiers not only allows for a natural and intuitive formulation of domain knowledge, but also improves the accuracy of inferred results

A Trust Management Framework for Decision Support Systems

In the era of information explosion, it is critical to develop a framework which can extract useful information and help people to make “educated” decisions. In our lives, whether we are aware of it, trust has turned out to be very helpful for us to make decisions. At the same time, cognitive trust, especially in large systems, such as Facebook, Twitter, and so on, needs support from computer systems. Therefore, we need a framework that can effectively, but also intuitively, let people express their trust, and enable the system to automatically and securely summarize the massive amounts of trust information, so that a user of the system can make “educated” decisions, or at least not blind decisions. Inspired by the similarities between human trust and physical measurements, this dissertation proposes a measurement theory based trust management framework. It consists of three phases: trust modeling, trust inference, and decision making. Instead of proposing specific trust inference formulas, this dissertation proposes a fundamental framework which is flexible and can be adapted by many different inference formulas. Validation experiments are done on two data sets: the Epinions.com data set and the Twitter data set. This dissertation also adapts the measurement theory based trust management framework for two decision support applications. In the first application, the real stock market data is used as ground truth for the measurement theory based trust management framework. Basically, the correlation between the sentiment expressed on Twitter and stock market data is measured. Compared with existing works which do not differentiate tweets’ authors, this dissertation analyzes trust among stock investors on Twitter and uses the trust network to differentiate tweets’ authors. The results show that by using the measurement theory based trust framework, Twitter sentiment valence is able to reflect abnormal stock returns better than treating all the authors as equally important or weighting them by their number of followers. In the second application, the measurement theory based trust management framework is used to help to detect and prevent from being attacked in cloud computing scenarios. In this application, each single flow is treated as a measurement. The simulation results show that the measurement theory based trust management framework is able to provide guidance for cloud administrators and customers to make decisions, e.g. migrating tasks from suspect nodes to trustworthy nodes, dynamically allocating resources according to trust information, and managing the trade-off between the degree of redundancy and the cost of resources

Trust networks for recommender systems

Recommender systems use information about their user’s profiles and relationships to suggest items that might be of interest to them. Recommenders that incorporate a social trust network among their users have the potential to make more personalized recommendations compared to traditional systems, provided they succeed in utilizing the additional (dis)trust information to their advantage. Such trust-enhanced recommenders consist of two main components: recommendation technologies and trust metrics (techniques which aim to estimate the trust between two unknown users.) We introduce a new bilattice-based model that considers trust and distrust as two different but dependent components, and study the accompanying trust metrics. Two of their key building blocks are trust propagation and aggregation. If user a wants to form an opinion about an unknown user x, a can contact one of his acquaintances, who can contact another one, etc., until a user is reached who is connected with x (propagation). Since a will often contact several persons, one also needs a mechanism to combine the trust scores that result from several propagation paths (aggregation). We introduce new fuzzy logic propagation operators and focus on the potential of OWA strategies and the effect of knowledge defects. Our experiments demonstrate that propagators that actively incorporate distrust are more accurate than standard approaches, and that new aggregators result in better predictions than purely bilattice-based operators. In the second part of the dissertation, we focus on the application of trust networks in recommender systems. After the introduction of a new detection measure for controversial items, we show that trust-based approaches are more effective than baselines. We also propose a new algorithm that achieves an immediate high coverage while the accuracy remains adequate. Furthermore, we also provide the first experimental study on the potential of distrust in a memory-based collaborative filtering recommendation process. Finally, we also study the user cold start problem; we propose to identify key figures in the network, and to suggest them as possible connection points for newcomers. Our experiments show that it is much more beneficial for a new user to connect to an identified key figure instead of making random connections

Trust and Distrust Aggregation Enhanced with Path Length Incorporation

Trust networks are social networks in which users can assign trust scores to each other. In order to estimate these scores for agents that are indirectly connected through the network, a range of trust score aggregators has been proposed. Currently, none of them takes into account the length of the paths that connect users; however, this appears to be a critical factor since longer paths generally contain less reliable information. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate several path length incorporating aggregation strategies in order to strike the right balance between generating more predictions on the one hand and maintaining a high prediction accuracy on the other hand.European Union (EU) TIN2010-17876; TIC-5299; TIC-05991FW

A NOVEL USER PROFILE-BASED FUZZY APPROACH FOR EVALUATING TRUST IN SEMANTIC WEB

ABSTRACT: As a developed World Wide Web architecture, the Semantic Web collects traditional web contents with a formal and understandable semantic using a machine. The main purpose of the Semantic Web is to increase automation, web information processing, and improve interactions and collaboration among information systems. The subject of trust is one of the main challenges in the semantic web. Since different tools and individuals exist in the semantic web, a certain measure of trust in an entity cannot be used and a central system is responsible for data collection and estimating the reliability. In this study, a fuzzy system is used to evaluate the trust measure in the semantic web. For this purpose, the user profile data including a list of pages, user sessions, and visited pages in each session, and the time of page viewings are used as semantic parameters. After determining the general framework of trust in the semantic web, the effectiveness of the above mentioned semantic parameters on the trust measure is investigated and effective parameters are used for evaluation in the fuzzy system. The experiment results show that the proposed fuzzy method with a mean absolute error of 2.5% and an average precision of 97.5% could achieve the right value of trust in the semantic web. ABSTRAK:  Sebagai senibina World Wide Web, Semantik Web mengumpul kandungan web tradisional bersama semantik formal dan mudah difahami menggunakan mesin. Tujuan utama Semantik Web adalah bagi meningkatkan automasi, pemprosesan maklumat web, dan meningkatkan interaksi dan kerjasama antara sistem maklumat. Kepercayaan adalah salah satu cabaran utama dalam web semantik. Disebabkan perbezaan alatan dan pelbagai individu wujud dalam web semantik, langkah tertentu sebagai entiti dipercayai tidak dapat digunakan dan sistem pusat adalah bertanggungjawab bagi pengumpulan data dan kebolehpercayaan anggaran. Dalam kajian ini, sistem rawak telah digunakan bagi menilai tahap kepercayaan dalam web semantik. Bagi tujuan ini, data profil pengguna termasuk senarai halaman, sesi pengguna, dan halaman yang dikunjungi dalam setiap sesi, dan masa paparan halaman telah digunakan sebagai parameter semantik. Selepas menentukan rangka umum kepercayaan dalam web semantik, keberkesanan parameter semantik yang dinyatakan di atas pada ukuran kepercayaan telah disiasat dan parameter yang berkesan telah digunakan bagi penilaian sistem rawak. Keputusan eksperimen menunjukkan bahawa kaedah rawak yang dicadangkan dengan ralat mutlak purata sebanyak 2.5% dan ketepatan purata sebanyak 97.5% dapat mencapai nilai kepercayaan yang benar dalam web semantik