A trust evaluation scheme for complex links in a social network: a link strength perspective

Potential security threats pose a significant challenge to evaluating the trustworthiness of complex links among users in a social network. Traditional trust computation methods typically consider user comments or interaction, thereby reflecting the trustworthiness between users according to their past experiences. However, the tie strength, which reflects the closeness of user relationships, is also a potential factor for estimating the trustworthiness of links among users. To incorporate this indicator, we propose a trust evaluation scheme for complex links comprising two aspects: the reliability and strength of links among uses. Our main contributions are (1) a trust calculation method, including direct trust for directly linked users and indirect trust for indirectly linked users, which is established based on the comment factor, forwarding factor, and approving factor; (2) a link strength evaluation method to determine the trustworthiness of direct and indirect links between users considering comment stability, mutual trust, interaction frequency, and common neighbours and community similarity, and (3) a link trust evaluation algorithm based on the link trust matrix synthesizing the reliability and strength of links. The experimental results and analysis show that our proposed scheme is feasible and effective in improving the performance of trust evaluation in a social network.