Predicting Trust and Distrust in Social Networks

As user-generated content and interactions have overtaken the web as the default mode of use, questions of whom and what to trust have become increasingly important. Fortunately, online social networks and social media have made it easy for users to indicate whom they trust and whom they do not. However, this does not solve the problem since each user is only likely to know a tiny fraction of other users, we must have methods for inferring trust - and distrust - between users who do not know one another. In this paper, we present a new method for computing both trust and distrust (i.e., positive and negative trust). We do this by combining an inference algorithm that relies on a probabilistic interpretation of trust based on random graphs with a modified spring-embedding algorithm. Our algorithm correctly classifies hidden trust edges as positive or negative with high accuracy. These results are useful in a wide range of social web applications where trust is important to user behavior and satisfaction.