Propagation of trust and confidence using intervals

Trust propagation is a widely-used approach to estimate the trustworthiness level of a target node in a web of trust, especially when the source node has no experience of direct interaction with the target. It is important to have not only an accurate estimate of trust, but also a measure of confidence in the propagated trust. In this paper we introduce a novel approach for propagation of trust and confidence through a web of trust based on our proposed idea of representation of trust and confidence using intervals. We consider this propagation method as a kind of multiplication among trust intervals. We show that this operator is more accurate for evaluation of propagated trust than the current approaches. We also report and analyze the results of experiments carried out on a well-known trust dataset which show that our proposed method improves the accuracy of trust propagation.