Inferring trust relationships in the social network: Evidence theory approach

The trust is one of the crucial and important factors for decision making in online social network. In this paper, we compute explicitly the level of trust, distrust and uncertainty between two users using social interactions. The study of social interactions is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of relationships between users and their behaviors in the social network. We use later this formulation to infer trust between a user and a stranger who has no direct interaction with this latter. Finally, we use the Dempster-Shafer theory to combine the different views of different users to infer trust between a user and a stranger who is connected through neighbors by introducing the friendship, family and professional relationship. The numerical study of the proposed model shows its acceptable performance.