Contextuality, Incompatibility and Biased Inference in a Quantum-Like Formulation of Computational Trust

Abstract

Trust models play an important role in computational environments. One of the main aims of the work undertaken in this domain is to provide a model that can better describe the socio-technical nature of computational trust. It has been recently shown that quantum-like formulations in the field of human decision making can better explain the underlying nature of these types of processes. Based on this research, the aim of this paper is to propose a novel model of trust based on quantum probabilities as the underlying mathematics of quantum theory. It will be shown that by using this new mathematical framework, we will have a powerful mechanism to model the contextuality property of trust. Also, it is hypothesized that many events or evaluations in the context of trust can be and should be considered as incompatible, which is unique to the noncommutative structure of quantum probabilities. The main contribution of this paper will be that, by using the quantum Bayesian inference mechanism for belief updating in the framework of quantum theory, we propose a biased trust inference mechanism. This mechanism allows us to model the negative and positive biases that a trustor may subjectively feel toward a certain trustee candidate. It is shown that by using this bias, we can model and describe the exploration versus exploitation problem in the context of trust decision making, recency effects for recently good or bad transactions, filtering pessimistic and optimistic recommendations that may result in good-mouthing or badmouthing attacks, the attitude of the trustor toward risk and uncertainty in different situations and the pseudo-transitivity property of trust. Finally, we have conducted several experimental evaluations in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in different scenarios.

Risk and Ambiguity in Information Seeking: Eye Gaze Patterns Reveal Contextual Behavior in Dealing with Uncertainty

“…[50] argued that relevance is an operator on Hilbert space and as such is part of the quantum measurement process, neither was our insight totally unexpected. Rather, connected to the uncertainty principle, we see noncommuting measurements to surface also in information seeking as another link to quantum decision theory [51,52,53].…”

Trust Computing Based on Argumentation Debates with Votes for Detecting Lying Agents

“…However, due to the uncertainty involved in this process, it is not prudent to presume that an agent is a liar by just interacting with him once. In general, the trustor's uncertainty about a partner decreases as the number of interactions between this partner and the trustor increases [Ashtiani and Azgomi 2014]. Therefore, we assume that the credibility of a source of information (σ s ) rely on the perceived uncertainty by the trustor, which can be estimated as follows:…”

“…Sources of information with credibility lower than 0.8 are considered liars, and they are ignored by the trustor, such as shown in Figure 3 (b). Notice that, due to the uncertainty principle discussed previously [Ashtiani and Azgomi 2014], an agent playing as a source of information becomes unreliable over time as the number of lies told by him increases. Also, as it is possible to see in Figure 3 the society are telling lies, the trustor still considers some evaluations shared by lying agents as truths.…”

A survey of quantum-like approaches to decision making and cognition

“…Unitary transformations correspond to an individual's shift in perspective and relate one point of view to another. Recently, by using this mechanism Ashtiani and Azgomi introduced a quantum-like model of computational trust (Ashtiani and Azgomi, 2014). Trust, is one of the most widely used concepts in various areas of computational domain such as computer security, recommender systems and so on.…”

“…Quantum Bayesian inference as a generalized version of the classical Bayesian inference mechanism can play a key role in modeling more complex inferences in the computational domains. For example, we have shown that the quantum Bayesian inference can be used to model a biased inference mechanism in the context of computational trust (Ashtiani and Azgomi, 2014). Of course, this is only a preliminary research and lots of developments in a wide range of directions can be assumed for these mechanisms.…”