User tendency-based rating scaling in online trading networks

Social networks often involve the users rating each other based on their beliefs, abilities, and other characteristics. This is particularly common in e-commerce platforms where buyers rate sellers based on their trustworthiness. However, the rating tends to vary between users due to differences in their individual scoring criteria. For example, in a transaction network, a positive user may give a high rating unless the transaction was unsatisfactory while a neutral user may give a mid-rating, consequently giving the same numeric score to different levels of satisfaction. In this paper, we propose a novel method called user tendency-based rating scaling, which adjusts the current rating (its score) based on the pattern of past ratings. We investigate whether this rating scaling method can classify between “good users” and “bad users” in online trade social networks better when compared with using the original rating scores without scaling. Classifying between good users and bad users is especially important for anonymous rating networks like Bitcoin transaction networks, where users’ reputations must be recorded to preclude fraudulent and risky users. We evaluate the proposed rating scaling method by performing user classification, link prediction, and clustering tasks, using three real-world online rating network datasets. We use both the original ratings and the scaled ratings as weights of graphs and use a weighted graph embedding method to find node representations that reflect users’ positive and negative information. The experimental results showed that using the proposed rating scaling method outperformed using the original (i.e., unscaled) ratings by up to 17% in classification accuracy, and by up to 2.5% in link prediction based on the AUC ROC measure, and by up to 21% in the clustering tasks based on the Dunn-index.