On the Optimality of Trust Network Analysis with Subjective Logic

Abstract

Building and measuring trust is one of crucial aspects in e-commerce, social networking and computer security. Trust networks are widely used to formalize trust relationships and to conduct formal reasoning of trust values. Diverse trust network analysis methods have been developed so far and one of the most widely used schemes is TNA-SL (Trust Network Analysis with Subjective Logic). Recent papers claimed that TNA-SL always finds the optimal solution by producing the least uncertainty. In this paper, we present some counter-examples, which imply that TNA-SL is not an optimal algorithm. Furthermore, we present a probabilistic algorithm in edge splitting to minimize uncertainty.