A Survey on Trust Modeling from a Bayesian Perspective

In this paper, we are concerned with trust modeling for agents in networked computing systems. As trust is a subjective notion that is invisible, implicit and uncertain in nature, many attempts have been made to model trust with aid of Bayesian probability theory, while the field lacks a global comprehensive analysis for variants of Bayesian trust models. We present a study to fill in this gap by giving a comprehensive review of the literature. A generic Bayesian trust (GBT) modeling perspective is highlighted here. It is shown that all models under survey can cast into a GBT based computing paradigm as special cases. We discuss both capabilities and limitations of the GBT perspective and point out open questions to answer, with a hope to advance GBT to become a pragmatic infrastructure for analyzing intrinsic relationships among variants of trust models and developing novel tools for trust evaluation.