Local Scalar Trust Metrics with a Fuzzy Adjustment Method

The interactions between people who do not know each other have been greatly increased with the on-going increase of people’s cyberspace activities. In this situation, there exist potential risk factors such as the possibility of fraud, so we need a method to reduce or eliminate those risk factors. Concerning this necessity, rating systems are widely used, and many trust metrics calculated from rate values that people give to each other are proposed to help them make decisions. However, the trust metrics decrease the accuracy, and this is caused by the different rating scales and ranges of each person. So, we propose a fuzzy adjustment method to solve this problem. It is possible to catch the exact meaning of the trust value that each person selects through applying fuzzy sets, which improve the accuracy of the trust metric calculated from the trust values. We have applied our fuzzy adjustment method to the TidalTrust algorithm, a representative algorithm for calculating the local scalar trust metric, and we performed an experimental evaluation with four data sets and three evaluation methods.