Trust Traversal: A trust link detection scheme in social network

The nature of free communication results in increased challenges with respect to the reliability of user interaction in online social network. It is difficult to ensure that the users in a large-scale network are familiar with one another and that they interact without risk. Users' behaviors might therefore be vulnerable to attacks or frauds. Trust relationship detection scheme is a feasible solution. This study proposes an original trust link detection scheme, named Trust Traversal, which includes three aspects, i.e., trust scheme, trust link category, and traversal scheme, which are used to build up strong or weak trust links among users. Firstly, we address overview of Trust Traversal scheme and its related formal definitions. Then, trust scheme model is proposed for managing calculation methods of subjective trust, reputation, and indirect link. Subjective trust is calculated based on past interaction data, while reputation is defined as collective objective trust with three factors: effective accumulation, time attenuation, and intensity factor. Additionally, trust of indirect link in trust scheme is computed with three rules: trust transitivity rule, reputation weight rule, and level attenuation rule. To describe the relationship with both reliability and closeness, we present a trust link category, which comprise three kinds of trust links: strong trust link, weak trust link, and untrusted link, and meanwhile, gives the classifying method based on two factors: mutual trust factor and interaction active factor. Moreover, Trust Traversal scheme for both single and multiple target users is proposed to detect strong or weak trust links, which implies trustable and close relationships among users. In Trust Traversal scheme, each step is determined by trust based probability, and thus the user with the strongest trust link would have the highest probability of being the traversal user in the trust link. And also, terminal mechanism of Trust Traversal scheme is discussed. Finally, we provide an examination to determine further the performance of our proposed scheme.