Accumulative Time Based Ranking Method to Reputation Evaluation in Information Networks

Due to over-abundant information on the Web, information filtering becomes a key task for online users to obtain relevant suggestions and how to extract the most related item is always a key topic for researchers in various fields. In this paper, we adopt tools used to analyze complex networks to evaluate user reputation and item quality. In our proposed Accumulative Time Based Ranking (ATR) algorithm, we take into account the growth record of the network to identify the evolution of the reputation of users and the quality of items, by incorporating two behavior weighting factors which can capture the hidden facts on reputation and quality dynamics for each user and item respectively. Our proposed ATR algorithm mainly combines the iterative approach to rank user reputation and item quality with temporal dependence compared with other reputation evaluation methods. We show that our algorithm outperforms other benchmark ranking algorithms in terms of precision and robustness on empirical datasets from various online retailers and the citation datasets among research publications. Therefore, our proposed method has the capability to effectively evaluate user reputation and item quality.