A Method for Assessment of Trust Relationship Strength Based on the Improved D-S Evidence Theory
Zhao Qiu · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2014
With the rapid development of Web 2.0technologies,social networks play an important role in our daily life,for example,more and more people deliver speech,communicate with each other,and share information in social networks.However,trust relationship is the basis of the interaction between users in social networks,and the trust relationship strength is also different between different users.In addition,the same users in different fields do not all have the same relationship strength.What's more,the uncertainty of trust relationship is still the biggest challenge of trust evaluation.Having given the issues which have been discussed above,this paper presents a flexible and intuitive method for the evaluation of trust relationship strength on the basis of improved D-S evidence theory.Overall,this method considers the following four aspects:the attention of the user,the credibility of the user,the vitality of the user,and the similarity of the users,which are regarded,subsequently,as four attribute evidences to access todistribution of basic trust based on membership degree principle of fuzzy theory at the same time. In order to evaluate the strength of trust relationship in a specific field,we build multi-source attribute evidences fusion model based on the four attribute evidences.Finally the model is built on the Epinions real-life dataset,experimental results reveal that using D-S evidence theory in strength prediction of trust relationship is feasible and advantageous,which provides valuable new ideas for trust relationship strength research in complex social networks.