OpinionWalk: An efficient solution to massive trust assessment in online social networks

Massive trust assessment (MTA) in an Online Social Network (OSN), i.e., computing the trustworthiness of all users in the network, is crucial in various OSN-related applications. Existing solutions are either too slow or inaccurate in addressing the MTA problem. We propose the OpinionWalk algorithm that accurately and efficiently conducts MTA in an OSN. OpinionWalk models trust by the Dirichlet distribution and uses a matrix to represent the direct trust relations among users. From the perspective of a user, other users' trustworthiness are stored in a column vector that is iteratively updated when the algorithm “walks” through the network, in a breadth-first search manner. We identify the overlapping subproblems property in MTA and prove OpinionWalk is a more efficient solution. The accuracy and execution time of OpinionWalk are evaluated and compared to benchmark algorithms including EigenTrust, TrustRank, MoleTrust, TidalTrust and AssessTrust, using two real-world datasets (Advogato and Pretty Good Privacy). Experimental results indicate that OpinionWalk is an efficient and accurate solution to MTA, compared to previous algorithms.