earticle

영어

Recently, the topic of predicting interpersonal trust in online social networks is receiving considerable attention, because trust plays a critical role in controlling the spread of distorted information and vicious rumors, as well as reducing uncertainties and risk from unreliable users in social networks. Several trust prediction models have been developed on the basis of transitivity and composability properties of trust; however, it is hard to find empirical studies on whether and how transitivity and composability properties of trust are operated in real online social networks. This study aims to predict interpersonal trust between two unknown users in social networks and verify the proposition on whether and how transitivity and composability of trust are operated in social networks. For this purpose, we chose three social network sites called FilmTrust, Advogato, and Epinion, which contain explicit trust information by their users, and we empirically investigated the proposition. Experimental results showed that trust can be propagated farther and farther along the trust link; however, when path distance becomes distant, the accuracy of trust prediction lowers because noise is activated in the process of trust propagation. Also, the composability property of trust is operated as we expected in real social networks. However, contrary to our expectations, when the path is synthesized more during the trust prediction, the reliability of predicted trust did not tend to increase gradually.