Trust Transitivity in Complex Social Networks

Abstract

In Online Social Networks (OSNs), participants can conduct rich activities, where trust is one of the most important factors for their decision making. This necessitates the evaluation of the trustworthiness between two unknown participants along the social trust paths between them based on the trust transitivity properties (i.e., if A trusts B and B trusts C, then A can trust C to some extent). In order to compute more reasonable trust value between two unknown participants, a critical and challenging problem is to make clear how and to what extent trust is transitive along a social trust path. To address this problem, we first propose a new complex social network structure that takes, besides trust, social relationships, recommendation roles and preference similarity between participants into account. These factors have significant influence on trust transitivity. We then propose a general concept, called Quality of Trust Transitivity (QoTT), that takes any factor with impact on trust transitivity as an attribute to illustrate the ability of a trust path to guarantee a certain level of quality in trust transitivity. Finally, we propose a novel Multiple QoTT Constrained Trust Transitivity (MQCTT) model. The results of our experiments demonstrate that our proposed MQCTT model follows the properties of trust and the principles illustrated in social psychology, and thus can compute more resonable trust values than existing methods that consider neither the impact of social aspects nor the properties of trust.