Comprehensive Trust Metrics for Information Networks

Existing computational trust systems analyze information networks to determine the “trustworthiness” of the nodes, but the scalar values they produce are both opaque and semantically variable, and knowing only that the trustworthiness of a website is “27” is not helpful to the user. Moreover, the simplistic means by which they are typically calculated can yield misleading results, sometimes dramatically so. We present a new, standardized set of trust metrics that instead compute the trustworthiness of an information source as a triple of truthfulness, completeness, and bias scores, and argue that these must be calculated relative to the user to be meaningful. We then explore these new metrics with a user study.