Trust Inference in Web-Based Social Networks Using Resistive Networks

By the immense growth of the Web-based social networks (WBSNs), the role of trust in connecting people together through WBSNs is getting more important than ever. In other words, since the probability of malicious behavior in WBSNs is increasing, it is necessary to evaluate the reliability of a person before trying to communicate with. Hence, it is desirable to find out how much a person should trust another one in a network. The approach to answer this question is usually called trust inference. In this paper, we propose a new trust inference algorithm (called RN-trust) based on the resistive networks concept. The algorithm, in addition to being simple, resolves some problems of previously proposed approaches. The analysis of the algorithm demonstrates that RN-trust calculates the trust values more accurately than previous approaches.