Strategies for predicting local trust based on trust propagation in social networks

Trust plays a critical role in determining social interactions in both online and offline networks, and reduces information overload, uncertainties and risk from unreliable users. In a social network, even if two users are not directly connected, one user can still trust the other user if there exists at least one path between the two users through friendship networks. This is the result of trust propagation based on the transitivity property of trust, which is "A trusts B and B trusts C, so A will trust C". It is important to provide a trust inference model to find reliable trust paths from a source user to an unknown target user, and to systematically combine multiple trust paths leading to a target user. We propose strategies for estimating level of trust based on Reinforcement Learning, which is particularly well suited to predict a long-term goal (i.e. indirect trust value on long-distance user) with short-term reward (i.e. direct trust value between directly connected users). In other words, we compare and evaluate how the length of available trust paths and aggregation methods affects prediction accuracy and then propose the best strategy to maximize the prediction accuracy. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.