Research on Trust Management Model for E-Commerce Based on Fuzzy Clustering Method

In Internet-based e-commerce, the transaction entities’ trust levels provided by e-commerce platform can be viewed as a key indicator for users selecting transaction partners. The trust of transaction entities objectively and comprehensively represents the integrated influence of various trust attributes. Aiming at uncertainty and ambiguity of trust in e-commerce, the concept of membership degree in fuzzy set theory is introduced, and the trust vector of the transaction entity is defined. Number of transactions, amount of transactions and bad feedback ratio are identified as the attributes of the trust feature vector. Fuzzy clustering-based trust management model for e-commerce is established, and corresponding trust calculation algorithm is proposed and described in detail. According to the model, a user selecting transaction partners can make smart decision considering the potential partners’ global (comprehensive) trust and local (direct) trust. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness and availability of the trust management model for e-commerce and trust calculation algorithm.