Comparison of the Beta and the Hidden Markov Models of Trust in Dynamic Environments

Computational trust and reputation models are used to aid the decisionmaking process in complex dynamic environments, where we are unable to obtain perfect information about the interaction partners. In this paper we present a comparison of our proposed hidden Markov trust model to the Beta reputation system. The hidden Markov trust model takes the time between observations into account, it also distinguishes between system states and uses methods previously applied to intrusion detection for the prediction of which state an agent is in. We show that the hidden Markov trust model performs better when it comes to the detection of changes in behavior of agents, due to its larger richness in model features. This means that our trust model may be more realistic in dynamic environments. However, the increased model complexity also leads to bigger challenges in estimating parameter values for the model. We also show that the hidden Markov trust model can be parameterized so that it responds similarly to the Beta reputation system.