Trust as a Metric for Resiliency in Signed Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new metric for assessing the resiliency of signed social networks by analyzing community trustworthiness, which helps evaluate the stability of platforms like Bitcoin OTC.

Contribution

It proposes a novel trustworthiness metric for community structures and a pipeline to assess network resiliency based on these scores.

Findings

Trustworthiness scores correlate with network stability.

The proposed method effectively identifies resilient communities.

Resiliency scores align with the true network dynamics.

Abstract

Recent technological advancements have resulted in a surge in online trading, raising severe concerns about theft and fraud, especially on platforms like Bitcoin OTC (over-the-counter), where users' identities remain anonymous. To mitigate the risk, it has become essential to capture the reputation of users based on their trade histories. The who-trusts-whom signed network of people has the capability to reflect the nature of such positive and negative relations between the users. It can be used to analyze linkage patterns, strength, and resiliency of such platforms. Due to the dynamic nature of trust between individuals, these trust networks are often vulnerable to link or node failures, making it critical to understand the stability of such systems. In this paper, we consider the problem of quantifying the resiliency of signed networks with the help of trustworthy community structures. We propose a metric for computing the Trustworthiness of a community structure. Using the trustworthiness scores of all communities structures, we generate a pipeline for assessing the resiliency of a signed network. We also show how these generated resiliency scores are concordant with the true nature of the network.