Research on Trust Prediction from a Sociological Perspective

Trust, as a major part of human interactions, plays an important role in helping users collect reliable information and make decisions. However, in reality, user-specified trust relations are often very sparse and follow a power law distribution; hence inferring unknown trust relations attracts increasing attention in recent years. Social theories are frameworks of empirical evidence used to study and interpret social phenomena from a sociological perspective, while social networks reflect the correlations of users in real world; hence, making the principle, rules, ideas and methods of social theories into the analysis of social networks brings new opportunities for trust prediction. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit homophily and social status in trust prediction by modeling social theories. We first give several methods to compute homophily coefficient and status coefficient, then provide a principled way to model trust prediction mathematically, and propose a novel framework, hsTrust, which incorporates homophily theory and status theory. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Further experiments are conducted to understand the importance of homophily theory and status theory in trust prediction.