English

Personalised and Dynamic Trust in Social Networks

Computers and Society 2009-05-09 v2 Information Retrieval Physics and Society

Abstract

We propose a novel trust metric for social networks which is suitable for application in recommender systems. It is personalised and dynamic and allows to compute the indirect trust between two agents which are not neighbours based on the direct trust between agents that are neighbours. In analogy to some personalised versions of PageRank, this metric makes use of the concept of feedback centrality and overcomes some of the limitations of other trust metrics.In particular, it does not neglect cycles and other patterns characterising social networks, as some other algorithms do. In order to apply the metric to recommender systems, we propose a way to make trust dynamic over time. We show by means of analytical approximations and computer simulations that the metric has the desired properties. Finally, we carry out an empirical validation on a dataset crawled from an Internet community and compare the performance of a recommender system using our metric to one using collaborative filtering.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0902.1475,
  title  = {Personalised and Dynamic Trust in Social Networks},
  author = {Frank E. Walter and Stefano Battiston and Frank Schweitzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0902.1475},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Revised, added Empirical Validation, submitted to Recommender Systems 2009

R2 v1 2026-06-21T12:09:24.092Z