A FUZZY SYSTEM FOR EVALUATING TRUSTWORTHINESS OF USERS IN A SOCIAL NETWORK

Abstract

In recent years, the emergence of various web-based social networks has led to the growth of social network users. These networks have become popular as a medium for disseminating information and communication. Governments and organizations also use social networks as a platform for better services. However, acting in such networks depends on the level of trust that members have with each other. The combination of personality attributes of a person can create a mental impression of the amount of trust that a person has. This amount of trust can affect the person's future interactions. Therefore, trust is an essential and important matter in these networks, especially when someone interacts with someone else on a web-based social network. We discuss this issue in this paper and provide a method for evaluating it. Measuring the accuracy is not easy for the users who are interacting with the social network. Here, the interactions are virtual. In this paper, we have used fuzzy logic to apply ambiguous data and to evaluate trustworthiness by taking into account the various personality attributes of users such as reliability, availability, interest, patience, and adaptability. As we used these attributes as input to the fuzzy system and based on the relevant fuzzy rules, we evaluated the trustworthiness of users in social networks. The proposed fuzzy system is extendable, because in this system, trust can be defined as a set of one or more personality attributes. Epinions social network dataset is also used to simulate and validate the proposed approach. In the proposed method, the MAE value is less than 0.015 and F-Score value more than 0.86. Based on the results, the presented fuzzy system shows an acceptable accuracy for evaluating the trustworthiness of users