An evolution-based robust social influence evaluation method in Online Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are becoming popular and attracting lots of participants. In OSN based e-commerce platforms, a buyer’s review of a product is one of the most important factors for other buyers’ decision makings. A buyer who provides high quality reviews thus has strong social influence, and can impact a large number of participants’ purchase behaviours in OSNs. However, the dishonest participants can cheat the existing social influence evaluation models by using some typical attacks, like Constant and Camouflage, to obtain fake strong social influence. Therefore, it is significant to accurately evaluate such social influence to recommend the participants who have strong social influences and provide high quality product reviews. In this paper, we propose an Evolutionary-Based Robust Social Influence (EB-RSI) method based on the trust evolutionary models. In our EB-RSI, we propose four influence impact factors in social influence evaluation, i.e., Total Trustworthiness (TT), Fluctuant Trend of Being Advisor (FTBA), Fluctuant Trend of Trustworthiness (FTT) and Trustworthiness Area (TA). They are all significant in the influence evaluation. We conduct experiments onto a real social network dataset Epinions, and validate the effectiveness and robustness of our EB-RSI by comparing with state-of-the-art method, SoCap. The experimental results demonstrate that our EB-RSI can more accurately evaluate participants’ social influence than SoCap.