A Trust Prediction Approach Capturing Agents' Dynamic Behavior

Abstract

Predicting trust among the agents is of great importance to various open distributed settings (e.g., e-market, peer-to-peer networks, etc.) in that dishonest agents can easily join the system and achieve their goals by circumventing agreed rules, or gaining unfair advantages, etc. Most existing trust mechanisms derive trust by statistically investigating the target agent's historical information. However, even if rich historical information is available, it is challenging to model an agent's behavior since an intelligent agent may strategically change its behavior to maximize its profits. We therefore propose a trust prediction approach to capture dynamic behavior of the target agent. Specifically, we first identify features which are capable of describing/representing context of a transaction. Then we use these features to measure similarity between context of the potential transaction and that of previous transactions to estimate trustworthiness of the potential transaction based on previous similar transactions' outcomes. Evaluation using real auction data and synthetic data demonstrates efficacy of our approach in comparison with an existing representative trust mechanism.