Trust Computation in Online Social Networks Using Co-Citation and Transpose Trust Propagation

Evaluating trust and distrust between users in online social networks is an important research problem. To address this problem, we provide a method for estimating continuous trust /distrust value between unconnected users. Our method is based on co-citation and transpose trust propagation. We determine on average how differently two users trust or are trusted by other users, and how differently a user trusts another user from how it is trusted by that user. Using these differences, we estimate four partial trust estimates and compute the final trust value from trustor to trustee as the weighted average of these partial estimates. We propose a basic framework that maximizes accuracy, robustness and coverage and show how we can further improve the accuracy at a lower coverage. We perform experiments on real world trust related networks that show that our proposed method outperforms recent state of the art trust computation methods in terms of accuracy and robustness on commonly used datasets.