Experiments of Trust Prediction in Social Networks by Artificial Neural Networks

Social network online services are growing at an exponential pace, both in quantity of users and diversity of services; thus, the evaluation of trust in the interaction among users and toward the system is a central issue from the user point of view. Trust can be grounded in past direct experience or in the indirect information provided by trusted third-party users shaping the trustee reputation. When there is no previous history of interactions, the truster must resort to some form of prediction in order to establish Trust or Distrust on a potential trustee. In this study, we deal with the prediction of trust relationships on the basis of reputation information. Trust can be positive or negative (Distrust), hence, we have a two-class problem. Feature vectors for the classification have binary-valued components. Artificial neural network and statistical classifiers provide state-of-the-art results with these features on a benchmarking trust database. In this article, we propose the application of a sample generation method for the minority class in order to reduce some of the effect of class imbalance among Trust and Distrust classes. Specifically, the approach shows high resiliency to system growth.