On the Impact of Trust Relationships on Social Network Group Formation

Members of virtual communities generally expect that their groups satisfy some given requirements. For this aim, the profile matching between user requirements and group characteristics can be considered as the most natural way to represent the group homogeneity, measuring how much the group members are mutually linked. However, optimizing profile matching does not guarantee that the group will continue to be homogeneous in time (i.e., cohesive). In the past we have already shown that, when group formation is driven by trust measures and profile matching group homogeneity is improved. In this work, we prove by experiments on a dataset extracted from a real social network, that trust measures can be used to effectively replace profile matching for optimizing group’s cohesion. Furthermore, we prove also that using a local trust measure will does not penalize the cohesion of the group.