A dynamic bidirectional heuristic trust path search algorithm

Online social networks greatly promote peoples' online interaction, where trust plays a crucial role. Trust prediction with trust path search is widely used to help users find the trusted friends and obtain valid information. However, the shortcomings of accuracy and time still exist in some famous algorithms. Therefore, the dynamic bidirectional heuristic search (DBHS) algorithm is proposed in this paper to find the reliable trust path by studying the heuristic search. First, the trust value and path length are comprehensively considered to find the most trusted user. Specially, it constrains the traversal depth based on the 'small world' theory and obtains the acceptable path set by using the relaxation coefficient lambda to relax the depth of the shortest path. By this way, some longer path with the higher trust can be considered to improve the precision of algorithm. Then, an adjustment factor is designed based on the meet in the middle (MM) algorithm to assign search weights to two directions based on the size of the search tree expanded, so as to improve the problem of no priori when fixed parameters are used. Besides, the complexity of unidirectional trust path search can also be reduced by searching from two directions, which can reduce the depth and improve the efficiency of search. Finally, the predictive trust degree is outputted by the trust propagation function. Two public datasets are used to generate experimental results, which show that DBHS can quickly search and form reliable trust relationship, and it partly improves other algorithms.