CATEF: Confidence-aware trust estimation framework

In a trust management system, it is useful to have a measure of confidence in the estimated value of trust. Considering the concept of confidence, results in more accurate estimation of trust. In this paper we introduce a computational framework for confidence-aware trust estimation, CATEF. In this framework, for an atomic trust opinion, the reliability of the opinion is estimated and considered as the confidence value. CATEF also suggests novel operators for aggregation and propagation of confidence-aware trust opinions. These operators take into account the number and consistency level of the aggregated opinions and the length of the propagation chain. The results of experiments carried out on the well-known dataset of Epinions, show that our approach increases the accuracy of trust inference comparing to the existing methods.