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 … Download paper here