Assessment of multi-hop interpersonal trust in social networks by Three-Valued Subjective Logic

Abstract

Assessing multi-hop interpersonal trust in online social networks (OSNs) is critical for many social network applications such as online marketing but challenging due to the difficulties of handling complex OSN topology, in existing models such as subjective logic, and the lack of effective validation methods. To address these challenges, we for the first time properly define trust propagation and combination in arbitrary OSN topologies by proposing 3VSL (Three-Valued Subjective Logic). The 3VSL distinguishes the posteriori and priori uncer- tainties existing in trust, and the difference between distorting and original opinions, thus be able to compute multi-hop trusts in arbitrary graphs. We theoretically proved the capability based on the Dirichlet distribution. Furthermore, an online survey system is implemented to collect interpersonal trust data and validate the correctness and accuracy of 3VSL in real world. Both experimental and numerical results show that 3VSL is accurate in computing interpersonal trust in OSNs. Index Terms—Interpersonal trust, trust establishment, online social networks, three-valued subjective logic, Dirichlet distribu- tion