Three Mathematical Approaches for Trust Trend Evaluation

Trust is a critical issue in e-commerce and e-service applications. Usually, the value of trust is in a dynamic process of change. At present, most of studies and applications regarding trust are focus on methods that result in a single final trust level (FTL) value to represent the trust level of sellers or service providers. Such simple trust evaluation methods may not be able to depict the trust history exactly, and may not be able to obtain the trust trend information. In this paper, presents three mathematical approaches for trust trend evaluation, these mathematical approaches can depict and predict the trust change trend. Experimental data confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of these mathematical approaches, meanwhile, analyze their different capacity for depicting the trust change trend.