A trust model stemmed from the diffusion theory for opinion evaluation

In open online communities, everyone can freely express opinions about other entities. As the quality of opinions may vary, it is important for users to evaluate opinions in order to determine how much to rely on. In this paper, we propose a novel trust model stemmed from the diffusion theory in social science (called DiffTrust), to evaluate the opinions of users (referred to as advisors) by modeling their trustworthiness. Specifically, an advisor’s trust building among users is considered as a diffusion process. Her trustworthiness perceived by a specific user is influenced by four important factors including the advisor’s characteristics directly observed by the user, susceptibility of the user, the contagious influence of other users already having a certain level of trust on the advisor, and the environment. DiffTrust also emphasizes on the dynamics of trust. Experimental results based on four real datasets verify the effectiveness of our model in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches.