Trust Evaluation via Large-Scale Complex Service-Oriented Online Social Networks

Service-oriented online social networks (SOSNs) are emerging ubiquitous platforms for numerous services where service consumers require the selection of trustworthy service providers who are unknown to them before invoking services with the aid of other intermediate participants. Under this circumstance, evaluation of the trust level of the service provider along the social trust paths from the service consumer to the service provider is required. To this end, selection of the optimal social trust path (OSTP) that can yield the most trustworthy evaluation result is a prerequisite. While existing single-trust-value methods can provide good but simple information to service consumers, more trust information, such as social intimacy degree between participants and role impact factor of intermediate participants, should be considered to represent the trust level of a service provider more comprehensively. When more trust information is considered, OSTP selection will become an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we propose path integral Monte Carlo quantum annealing (PIMCQA)-based OSTP (PIMCQA_OSTP) selection algorithm for complex SOSNs. PIMCQA_OSTP serves as the very first quantum inspired OSTP selection algorithm in complex SOSNs. Due to that quantum mechanics work with wave functions that can sample different regions of phase space equally well, and quantum systems can tunnel through classically impenetrable potential barriers between energy valleys, PIMCQA_OSTP shows its outstanding search ability and outperforms existing methods. Results of experiments on a real dataset of online social networks verify that PIMCQA_OSTP is a promising tool and is especially fit for complex SOSNs.