Trusting the Trusted: An Empirical Analysis

Authors

Sanjog Ray, Indian Institute of Management
Ambuj Mahanti, Indian Institute of Management

Abstract

One aspect of research in the area of bootstrapping of cold start users in trust-aware recommender systems is on guiding new users find trusted users in the trust network. In this paper we examine the question “Which type of users do cold start users actually trust?” We analyze the users trusted by cold start users in the Epinions dataset (Massa & Avesani, 2006a). We examine the set of trusted users on the basis of four critical parameters: number of outgoing links, number of incoming links, number of items rated and a hybrid parameter defined as preference score. We also experimentally evaluate the impact of the four parameters on prediction accuracy. Our analysis shows that cold start users will more likely trust a user with higher number of incoming links as a trusted user even though trusting users with high preference score would result in better prediction accuracy.

Recommended Citation

Ray, Sanjog and Mahanti, Ambuj (2012) "Trusting the Trusted: An Empirical Analysis," Communications of the IIMA: Vol. 12: Iss. 4, Article 1.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.58729/1941-6687.1196
Available at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/ciima/vol12/iss4/1