MATRI: a multi-aspect and transitive trust inference model

Trust inference, which is the mechanism to build new pair-wise trustworthiness relationship based on the existing ones, is a fundamental integral part in many real applications, e.g., e-commerce, social networks, peer-to-peer networks, etc. State-of-the-art trust inference approaches mainly employ the transitivity property of trust by propagating trust along connected users (a.k.a. trust propagation), but largely ignore other important properties, e.g., prior knowledge, multi-aspect, etc.

In this paper, we propose a multi-aspect trust inference model by exploring an equally important property of trust, i.e., the multi-aspect property. The heart of our method is to view the problem as a recommendation problem, and hence opens the door to the rich methodologies in the field of collaborative filtering. The proposed multi-aspect model directly characterizes multiple latent factors for each trustor and trustee from the locally-generated trust relationships. Moreover, we extend this model to incorporate the prior knowledge as well as trust propagation to further improve inference accuracy. We conduct extensive experimental evaluations on real data sets, which demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvement over several existing benchmark approaches. Overall, the proposed method (MaTrI) leads to 26.7% - 40.7% improvement over its best known competitors in prediction accuracy; and up to 7 orders of magnitude speedup with linear scalability.