A decentralized recommender system for effective web credibility assessment

Abstract

An overwhelming and growing amount of data is available online. The problem of untrustworthy online information is augmented by its high economic potential and its dynamic nature, e.g. transient domain names, dynamic content, etc. In this paper, we address the problem of assessing the credibility of web pages by a decentralized social recommender system. Specifically, we concurrently employ i) item-based collaborative filtering (CF) based on specific web page features, ii) user-based CF based on friend ratings and iii) the ranking of the page in search results. These factors are appropriately combined into a single assessment based on adaptive weights that depend on their effectiveness for different topics and different fractions of malicious ratings. Simulation experiments with real traces of web page credibility evaluations suggest that our hybrid approach outperforms both its constituent components and classical content-based classification approaches.