Bayesian Belief Network Models of Trust and Social Capital for Social

Software Systems Design

Ben K. Daniel1, 3, Juan-Diego Zapata-Rivera2, Richard A. Schwier3 & Gordon I. McCalla1

ARIES Research Group1

Department of Computer Science
University of Saskatchewan
Canada
Educational Testing Services2
USA
Educational Communications and Technology3
University of Saskatchewan, Canada

ABSTRACT mutual understanding, and shared values and

BBN models enable reasoning when there is
uncertainty. They combine the advantages of an
intuitive visual representation with a solid
mathematical basis in Bayesian probability. This
paper builds a computational framework for modeling
imprecise and inconsistent data that is relevant to
social software systems design. Drawing from the
framework, we illustrate the process involved in
building Bayesian belief models of trust and social
capital in virtual communities.
INTRODUCTION
Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) techniques are
increasingly being used for understanding and
simulating computational models of social
software systems. BBN models enable reasoning
when there is uncertainty [8]. They combine the
advantages of an intuitive visual representation
with a sound mathematical basis in Bayesian
probability. Though BBN techniques are elegant
ways for capturing uncertainties, considerable
effort is required to create conditional probability
values for the given variables in a network. We
propose a computational framework drawing
from both qualitative and quantitative
descriptions of conditional probability values,
and we illustrate how the framework has been
used to build models of trust and social capital
that can be used as decision tools for the design
of social software systems.
SETTING THE MOEDELLING SCENE
Social capital is one useful framework for
addressing social issues in communities and
distributed groups; however, the concept remains
elusive and imprecise. Many variables comprise
the construct of social capital. Cohen and Prusak
[1] noted that social capital consists of the stock
of active connections among people, the trust,
behaviors that bind the members of communities
together. In the context of virtual communities,
positive interaction provides value to its
participants especially when it is built upon
positive attitudes among individuals in a
community [2]. Putnam [10] suggested that
building social capital requires continuous and
positive interaction.
Further, positive interaction occurs when
participants have a common set of expectations,
mediated by a set of shared social protocols and
shared understanding [2]. Furthermore, different
forms of awareness in a virtual community can
encourage positive interaction and productive
collaboration [6][7]. Awareness can also foster
trust; trust develops as people become
sufficiently aware of others in the community
(who is who, who knows who, who knows what,
who is located where) and learn what to expect
from each other. Being able to examine others’
past behaviors in the community is necessary for
building trust [9] [1].
BAYESIAN BELIEF NETWORK
A Bayesian network is a particular type of
graphical model, frequently used in applications
of artificial intelligence for building probabilistic
expert systems. Bayesian networks can be used
to model probabilistic relationships among
variables. In some cases, their graphical structure
can be loosely interpreted as the result of direct
causal dependencies between variables. In
domains with many causal relations, such as in
medical diagnosis (symptoms cause diseases),
human experts are usually able to express their
domain knowledge in the graphical structure of
the network. For example, in a model for
medical diagnosis, the parameters of the network
are the conditional probabilities of effects given
the state of their direct causes.
Constructing a BBN generally involves several
steps. The first step in constructing BBN models
is to define the problem or opportunity that needs
to be modeled. This is followed by the
identification of possible critical variables in a
particular domain, along with their possible
states [5]. In our work we have identified
variables constituting social capital drawn
mainly from the literature (see table1) and added
others that we believe may be relevant in the
context of virtual. The variables identified are
then assigned potential states.

Table 1. Operationalisation of variables of social capital

Name Definition States

Interaction Exchanging of information Present/Absent

between two or more
individuals via text, video, or
any other digital media
Attitudes Individuals' general Positive/Negative
perception about each other
and others' actions
Community The type of environment, Virtual learning community
Type tools, goals, and tasks that (VLC) or Distributed
define the group community of practice
(DCoP)

Shared A mutual High/Low

Understanding agreement/consensus
between two or more agents
about the meaning of an
object
Awareness Knowledge of people, tasks, Present/Absent
or environment and or all of
the above
Demographic Knowledge of an individual: Present/Absent
Awareness country of origin, language
and location
Professional Knowledge of an individual’s Present/Absent
Awareness background training,
affiliation etc.
Competence Knowledge about an Present/Absent
Awareness individual’s capabilities,
competencies, and skills
Capability Knowledge of an individual’s Present/Absent
Awareness competences and skills in
regards to performing a
particular task
Social The mutually agreed upon, Present/Absent
Protocols acceptable and unacceptable
patterns of behaviour in a
community
Trust A particular level of certainty High/Low
or confidence with which an
agent uses to assess the action
of another agent

The second step in building a BBN model
involves mapping identified variables to a
network structure based on logical, and coherent
qualitative reasoning. The resulting acyclic
directed graph shows dependencies among
variables (see figure 1).
Figure 1. A BBN model of trust and social capital
in virtual communities [3]
The third step in building the model involves
assigning initial probabilities to each node in a
network. In our approach initial prior and
conditional probabilities are generated by
qualitative descriptions of the strength of the
relationship among variables in a network. This
approach takes into account the number of states
of a variable, the number of parents, the relative
strength of a variable (e.g., strong -S, medium -
M, weak -W) and the kind of
relationship/influence of the variable (e.g.,
positive or negative influence - +/- ) to produce
initial prior and conditional probabilities. Once
an initial model is elicited, particular scenarios
are used to refine and document the network [3].
QUERYING THE NETWORK
The fourth step in the modeling process is to
observe changes in the network when new
evidence affecting one or more of the nodes is
added to the network. Querying a BBN refers to
the process of updating conditional probability
tables and making inferences based on new
evidence. One way of analyzing and refining a
BBN is to develop a detailed number of
scenarios or cases grounded on data, intuition,
and experts’ opinions describing a set of
phenomena in a virtual community. A
scenario/case refers to a written synopsis of
inferences drawn from observed phenomena,
intuition or empirical data. For illustration, we
describe a scenario in a distributed community of
practice, whose members have a high level of
shared understanding, professional awareness
and positive interactions. Using this scenario to
query the network, we observed higher level of
trust P (Trust=0.93) and subsequently, increasing
level of social capital P (Social capital=0.73)
(see Figure 2).
Figure 2. High shared understanding, awareness
and positive interactions
By comparison, we consider the level of social
capital and trust in a distributed community of
practice (DCoP), whose members have low level
of shared understanding, and who are not aware
of their professional affiliations, but who
nevertheless have come together to interact
around certain issues. Updating the network
reveals significant drop in probabilities of trust P
(Trust=0.73) by 0.2 and social capital P (Social
capital = 0.6) by 0.13 (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Low shared understanding and absence
of awareness
The two scenarios presented above were
developed with the assumptions that a distributed
community of practice is typically a group of
geographically dispersed professionals in
different fields who share common practices and
interests in a particular area of concern, and
whose activities can be enriched and mediated by
information and communication technologies.
Such a group usually maintains high level of
shared understanding and professional awareness,
and so variation in the level of shared
understanding and awareness of each other
within such a group can affect the level of trust
and social capital as demonstrated by changes in
the probability distributions in the network.
CONCLUSION
Bayesian networks techniques are well suited to
handle partial knowledge of a domain and
effectively make coherent predictions, and they
provide a natural way to encode dependencies
among variables in a domain. The approach
presented in this paper allows researchers to
easily build sophisticated initial computational
models based on experts’ opinions and refine the
models as new evidence is gathered. It also
enables them to perform model verifications
using pre-post sensitivity analysis, to establish
the strength of casual relations among variables
in the network, as well as corroborate results
with other techniques to reach valid, coherent
and reliable conclusions.
Scenarios/cases for updating a network as shown
in the two examples can provide an effective
way of reasoning when there is uncertainty in the
system and in domains where there are no
concrete data to base judgments or decisions.
Predictions based on the two scenarios show that
trust in virtual communities can be influenced by
variables such as awareness, social protocols and
shared understanding. The predictions also
suggest that trust is context dependent on the
nature of the community and individuals in that
community.
Though we have not conducted specific
experiments correlating trust with different kinds
of awareness as shown in the model, we suggest
our approach sets the stage for such studies. It is
also possible to extend this framework to model
similar problems in other domains relevant for
building social software. And finally, the
combination of qualitative and quantitative
reasoning can support both hard and soft data
structures needed for building Bayesian network
models.
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