Promoting accuracy of trust bootstrapping from rating network

To reduce the influence of evaluating trust of a commodity may be affected easily by unfair and malicious rates when the commodity has only few rates on e-commerce platform, a trust bootstrapping method based on assessing the credibility of the rate was presented. The credibility of a rate was got through evaluating the rates for other commodities and related to the factors of the number of rates by the rater, the rater's transaction amount and the price of the rated commodity. The trust value of a commodity without a rate was derived from the shop to which this commodity belonged and the declared attributes of this commodity. The trust value of a commodity which owned rates with sufficient high credibility was determined by these rates with high credibility. Otherwise the trust value was determined partly by rates or was processed according to a commodity without a rate. Calculation, analysis and experimental results show that this presented method, evaluating the credibility of a rate by its rating network, compared with the conventional method and k-means clustering method, has the smallest error and is not sensitive to the ratio of malicious rates. This method can help users select reliable commodities sold at the initial stage on e-commerce platforms.