Ranking reputation and quality in online rating systems

PLoS One. 2014 May 12;9(5):e97146. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0097146. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

How to design an accurate and robust ranking algorithm is a fundamental problem with wide applications in many real systems. It is especially significant in online rating systems due to the existence of some spammers. In the literature, many well-performed iterative ranking methods have been proposed. These methods can effectively recognize the unreliable users and reduce their weight in judging the quality of objects, and finally lead to a more accurate evaluation of the online products. In this paper, we design an iterative ranking method with high performance in both accuracy and robustness. More specifically, a reputation redistribution process is introduced to enhance the influence of highly reputed users and two penalty factors enable the algorithm resistance to malicious behaviors. Validation of our method is performed in both artificial and real user-object bipartite networks.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Artificial Intelligence*
  • Internet*
  • Quality Control

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by the EU FP7 Grant 611272 (project GROWTHCOM) and by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 200020-143272). D.-B. Chen acknowledges support from the Tsinghua-Tencent Joint Laboratory for Internet Innovation Technology, and the Huawei University-Enterprise Cooperation Project YBCB2011057. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.