On the Trust Decision in Virtual Society: Using the Least Point Principle in Dempster-Shafer Theory of Belief Functions

In the virtual society on Internet seeking trusted nodes is a very difficult task in that there are so many elements to make all things uncertain. Therefore how to make trust decision becomes troublesome and has attracted interest from so many researchers. Traditional decision-making methods are mainly dependent on some uncertain theories, which include fuzzy sets theory, rough set theory, Bayesian network, probability theory and mathematical statistics. But none of them is qualified when we consider the QoS. In this paper, the lease point principle (LPP) is defined for the first time and used to help trust decision in Dempster-Shafer theory of belief function, then an universal algorithm, least point principle based trust decision (LPPBTD),is designed, which is followed by several experiments. The results computed by the experiments are nearly consistent with the reality, which verifies the fitness of using the proposed method to make trust decision.