Propagation of trust and distrust

Abstract

A (directed) network of people connected by ratings or trust scores, and a model for propagating those trust scores, is a fundamental building block in many of today's most successful e-commerce and recommendation systems. We develop a framework of trust propagation schemes, each of which may be appropriate in certain circumstances, and evaluate the schemes on a large trust network consisting of 800K trust scores expressed among 130K people. We show that a small number of expressed trusts/distrust per individual allows us to predict trust between any two people in the system with high accuracy. Our work appears to be the first to incorporate distrust in a computational trust propagation setting.