Visualizing Transaction Context in Trust and Reputation Systems

Abstract

Abstract-Transaction context is an important aspect that should be taken into account for reputation-based trust assessment, because referrals are bound to the situation-specific context in which they were created. The non-consideration of transaction context may cause several threats such as the value imbalance problem. Exploiting this weakness, a seller can build high reputation by selling cheap products while cheating on the expensive ones. In the recent years, multiple approaches have been introduced that address this challenge. All of them chose metrics leading to numerical reputation values. These values, however, are non-transparent and quite hard to understand for the end-user. In this work, in contrast, we combine reputation assessment and visual analytics to provide an interactive visualization of multivariate reputation data. We thereby allow the user to analyze the data sets and draw conclusions by himself. In this way, we enhance transparency, involve the user in the evaluation process and as a consequence increase the users' trust in the reputation system.

TRIVIA: visualizing reputation profiles to detect malicious sellers in electronic marketplaces

“…Thus far, VA has not played a role in trust and reputation except two works that address the interactive visual detection of context-based attacks on reputation systems [16] as well as unfair ratings [17]. Approaches making use of visual representations only created static visualizations of relationship graphs or reputation scores [18,19].…”

“…Although transaction context has been recognized to play an important role for trust evaluation in literature [33,34], only a very limited number of trust models formalizes the influence of context for reputation assessment [35]. The non-consideration of the transaction context, however, might lead to the value imbalance problem, where a malicious seller can build a high reputation selling cheap products while cheating on the expensive ones [16]. To cope with this problem, an interactive visualization of transaction context can provide a remedy.…”

“…6a. For a detailed description of parallel coordinates as a technique to depict transaction context in trust and reputation systems including case studies based on real-life data, please refer to [16]. A second visualization technique to depict multivariate data is the star plot (Fig.…”

“…Besides the price, a different manifestation of this attack could be a discrimination based on different product categories. Further examples of using a parallel coordinates visualization to detect context-based attacks can be found in a recent work [16]. Thereby, they carry out case studies by means of real-life data.…”

Interactive Visualization of Recommender Systems Data

“…ere are also several works that provide a detailed description of how reputation systems data may be interactively visualized (e.g. [22], [27], [29]). Even though reputation systems share some fundamental similarities with recommender systems data [18,33], however, the simple transfer of their results to recommender systems is not possible without further ado because of the high diversity of recommender systems data.…”