Skip to main content
Log in

Pairwise trust inference by subgraph extraction

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Social Network Analysis and Mining Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstr act

Inferring pairwise trustworthiness is a core building block behind many real applications, e.g., e-commence, p2p networks, mobile ad hoc network, etc. Most of the existing inference algorithms suffer from the scalability and usability issues due to the large scale of the underlying social networks. In this paper, we propose subgraph extraction to address these challenges. The core of the proposed method consists of two stages: path selection and component induction. The path selection stage is flexible and it admits many of existing top-k path extraction algorithms. We propose two evolutionary algorithms for component induction stage. Our method has two main advantages. First, the outputs of both stages can be used as an intermediate step to speed up a variety of existing trust inference algorithms. Second, it improves the usability of the trust inference result by presenting an intuitive subgraph that concisely summarizes how the trustworthiness score is calculated. The extensive experimental evaluations on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://www.trustlet.org/wiki/Advogato_dataset.

References

  • Anand D, Bharadwaj KK (2013) Pruning trust–distrust network via reliability and risk estimates for quality recommendations. Soc Netw Anal Min 3(1):65–84

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bäck T (1996) Evolutionary algorithms in theory and practice: evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, genetic algorithms. Oxford University Press, USA

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Barbian G (2011) Assessing trust by disclosure in online social networks. In: Proceedings of the international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining, pp 163–170

  • Buchegger S, Le Boudec JY (2004) A robust reputation system for mobile ad-hoc networks. Tech. rep., KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Theoretical Computer Science Group

  • Faloutsos C, McCurley KS, Tomkins (2004) A fast discovery of connection subgraphs. In: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp 118–127

  • Fang H, Zhang J, Thalmann NM (2013) A trust model stemmed from the diffusion theory for opinion evaluation. In: Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, pp 805–812

  • Fazeen M, Dantu R, Guturu P (2011) Identification of leaders, lurkers, associates and spammers in a social network: context-dependent and context-independent approaches. Soc Netw Anal Min 1(3):241–254

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Golbeck J (2009) Trust and nuanced profile similarity in online social networks. ACM Trans Web 3(4):12

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Golbeck J, Hendler J (2006) Inferring binary trust relationships in Web-based social networks. ACM Trans Internet Technol 6:497–529

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guha R, Kumar R, Raghavan P, Tomkins A (2004) Propagation of trust and distrust. In: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, pp 403–412

  • Hang CW, Wang Y, Singh MP. (2009) Operators for propagating trust and their evaluation in social networks. In: Proceedings of The 8th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, vol 2, pp 1025–1032

  • Hang C, Zhang Z, Singh M (2013) Generalized trust propagation with limited evidence. IEEE Comput 46(3):78–85

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hershberger J, Maxel M, Suri S (2007) Finding the k shortest simple paths: a new algorithm and its implementation. ACM Trans Algorithms 3(4):45

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Hintsanen P. (2007) The most reliable subgraph problem. In: Proceedings of the 11th European conference on principles and practice of knowledge discovery in databases, pp 471–478

  • Hintsanen P, Toivonen H (2008) Finding reliable subgraphs from large probabilistic graphs. Data Min Knowl Disc 17(1):3–23

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Hintsanen P, Toivonen H, Sevon P (2010) Fast discovery of reliable subnetworks. In: Proceedings of the international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining, pp 104–111

  • Jiang W, Wang G, Wu J (2012) Generating trusted graphs for trust evaluation in online social networks. Future Gener Comput Syst (online version)

  • Jin R, Liu L, Aggarwal C (2011) Discovering highly reliable subgraphs in uncertain graphs. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp 992–1000

  • Jøsang A, Ismail R, Boyd C (2007) A survey of trust and reputation systems for online service provision. Decis Support Syst 43(2):618–644

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kamvar SD, Schlosser MT, Garcia-Molina H (2003) The Eigentrust algorithm for reputation management in p2p networks. In: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web, pp 640–651

  • Koren Y, North S, Volinsky C (2006) Measuring and extracting proximity in networks. In: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp 245–255

  • Kuter U, Golbeck J (2007) Sunny: a new algorithm for trust inference in social networks using probabilistic confidence models. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, pp 1377–1382

  • Leskovec J, Kleinberg J, Faloutsos C (2005) Graphs over time: densification laws, shrinking diameters and possible explanations. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp 177–187

  • Li J, Zhang Z, Zhang W (2010) Mobitrust: trust management system in mobile social computing. In: Proceedings of the IEEE 10th international conference on computer and information technology, pp 954–959

  • Liu G, Wang Y, Orgun M (2009) Trust inference in complex trust-oriented social networks. In: Proceedings of the international conference on computational science and engineering, pp 996–1001

  • Liu G, Wang Y, Orgun M (2010) Optimal social trust path selection in complex social networks. In: Proceedings of the twenty-fourth AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, pp 1391–1398

  • Liu G, Wang Y, Orgun M (2012) Social context-aware trust network discovery in complex contextual social networks. In: Proceedings of the twenty-sixth AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, pp 101–107

  • Martins E, Pascoal M (2003) A new implementation of Yens ranking loopless paths algorithm.. 4OR Q J Oper Res 1(2):121–133

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Massa P, Avesani P (2005) Controversial users demand local trust metrics: an experimental study on epinions.com community. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, pp 121–126

  • Mui L, Mohtashemi M, Halberstadt A (2002) A computational model of trust and reputation. In: Proceedings of the 35th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences, pp 2431–2439

  • Nordheimer K, Schulze T, Veit D (2010) Trustworthiness in networks: a simulation approach for approximating local trust and distrust values. In: Proceedings of the 4th IFIP WG 11.11 international conference on trust management, pp 157–171

  • Paul R, Richard Z (2002) Trust among strangers in Internet transactions: empirical analysis of eBay’s reputation system.. In: The economics of the Internet and E-Commerce. Advances in Applied Microeconomics: a Research Annual, vol 11, pp 127–157

  • Richardson M, Agrawal R, Domingos P (2003) Trust management for the semantic Web. In: The Semantic Web, vol 2870, pp 351–368

  • Robins G, Pattison P, Kalish Y, Lusher D (2007) An introduction to exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks. Soc Netw 29(2):173–191

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tang J, Sun J, Wang C, Yang Z (2009) Social influence analysis in large-scale networks. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp 807–816

  • Tang J, Gao H, Liu H, Das Sarma A (2012) etrust: understanding trust evolution in an online world. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp 253–261

  • Tong H, Faloutsos C, Koren Y (2007) Fast direction-aware proximity for graph mining. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, pp 747–756

  • Wang Y, Singh MP (2006) Trust representation and aggregation in a distributed agent system. In: Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence, pp 1425–1430

  • Wang Y, Singh MP (2007) Formal trust model for multiagent systems. In: Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on artificial intelligence, pp 1551–1556

  • Wang G, Wu J (2011) Multi-dimensional evidence-based trust management with multi-trusted paths. Future Gener Comput Syst 27(5):529–538

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang D, Sutcliffe A, Zeng XJ (2011) A trust-based multi-ego social network model to investigate emotion diffusion. Soc Netw Anal Min 1(4):287–299

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Watts D, Strogatz S (1998) Collective dynamics of ’small-world’ networks. Nature 393(6684):440–442

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xiang R, Neville J, Rogati M (2010) Modeling relationship strength in online social networks. In: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World Wide Web, pp 981–990

  • Xiong L, Liu L (2004) Peertrust: supporting reputation-based trust for peer-to-peer electronic communities. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 16(7):843–857

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yao Y, Zhou J, Han L, Xu F, Lü J (2011) Comparing linkage graph and activity graph of online social networks. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on social informatics, vol 6984, pp 84–97

  • Yao Y, Tong H, Yan X, Xu F, Lu J (2013) MATRI: a multi-aspect and transitive trust inference model. In: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web, pp 1467–1476

  • Yen J (1971) Finding the k shortest loopless paths in a network. Manag Sci 17(11):712–716

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Zhou R, Hwang K (2007) Powertrust: a robust and scalable reputation system for trusted peer-to-peer computing. IEEE Trans Parallel Distrib Syst 18(4):460–473

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ziegler C, Lausen G (2005) Propagation models for trust and distrust in social networks. Inf Syst Front 7(4):337–358

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Chao Qian for his useful comments. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61021062, 61073030), and the National 973 Program of China (No. 2009CB320702). The second author was partly sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-09-2-0053.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuan Yao.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Yao, Y., Tong, H., Xu, F. et al. Pairwise trust inference by subgraph extraction. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 3, 953–968 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-013-0140-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-013-0140-x

Keywords

Navigation