An association based approach to propagate social trust in social networks

The behaviour based trust models generally compute social trust using interactions of a member with other members, referred to as “friends”. These models largely ignore the interactions of friends with their friends, referred to as “friendship effects”. Results from social studies and behavioural science show that friends have a significant influence on the behaviour of the members in the community. Following the famous Spanish proverb on friendship “Tell Me Your Friends and I Will Tell You Who You Are”, we extend our behaviour based trust model by incorporating the “friendship effect”. In this paper, we present a trust propagation model based on associations which combines the behaviour of both individual members and their friends. The propagation of trust in our model depends on three key factors: the density of interactions, the degree of separation and the decay of friendship effect. We evaluate our model using a real dataset and make observations on what happens in a social network with models with and without trust propagation. We report the results in this paper.