Trust Relationship Prediction in Alibaba E-Commerce Platform

Abstract

This paper introduces how to infer trust relationships from billion-scale networked data to benefit Alibaba E-Commerce business. To effectively leverage the network correlations between labeled and unlabeled relationships to predict trust relationships, we formalize trust into multiple types and propose a graphical model to incorporate type-based dyadic and triadic correlations, namely eTrust. We also present a fast learning algorithm in order to handle billion-scale networks. Systematically, we evaluate the proposed methods on four different genres of datasets with labeled trust relationships: Alibaba, Epinions, Ciao and Advogato. Experimental results show that the proposed methods achieve significantly better performance than several comparison methods (+1.7-32.3% by accuracy; p << 0.01, with t-test). Most importantly, when handling the real large networked data with over 1,200,000,000 edges (Ali-large), our method achieves 2,000x speedup to infer trust relationships, comparing with the traditional graph learning algorithms. Finally, we have applied the inferred trust relationships to Alibaba E-commerce platform: Taobao, and achieved 2.75% improvement on gross merchandise volume (GMV).

Paper

Yukuo Cen, Jing Zhang, Gaofei Wang, Yujie Qian, Chuizheng Meng, Zonghong Dai, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang. (TKDE 2019)

Trust Relationship Prediction in Alibaba E-Commerce Platform

[PDF] [Code & Data]

Yukuo Cen Jing Zhang Gaofei Wang Yujie Qian Chuizheng Meng Zonghong Dai Hongxia Yang Jie Tang