On Analyzing User Ratings and Directional Trusts in Epinions.com

Recently, product review sites that contain user ratings and trust statements such as Epinions.com have become popular, and many attempts have been made to analyze user behavior on those sites. In this paper, we first define three different user groups for each user, i.e. Trustee, Trust or, and Irrelevance which describe different kinds of trust statements. Then we investigate the relationship between each user and users in his/her different user groups by comparing how their ratings are similar on Epinions data sets. Most existing works simply ignored Trust or group when considering a certain user. However, our observations suggest that Trust or group still meaningful that should not be simply disregarded.