Improved trust-aware recommender system using small-worldness of trust networks

Abstract

The trust network is a social network where nodes are inter-linked by their trust relations. It has been widely used in various applications, however, little is known about its structure due to its highly dynamic nature. Based on five trust networks obtained from the real online sites, we contribute to verify that the trust network is the small-world network: the nodes are highly clustered, while the distance between two randomly selected nodes is short. This has considerable implications on using the trust network in the trust-aware applications. We choose the trust-aware recommender system as an example of such applications and demonstrate its advantages by making use of our verified small-world nature of the trust network.