DGTEN: A Robust Deep Gaussian based Graph Neural Network for Dynamic Trust Evaluation with Uncertainty-Quantification Support

Abstract

Dynamic trust evaluation in large, rapidly evolving graphs demands models that capture changing relationships, express calibrated confidence, and resist adversarial manipulation. DGTEN (Deep Gaussian-Based Trust Evaluation Network) introduces a unified graph-based framework that does all three by combining uncertainty-aware message passing, expressive temporal modeling, and built-in defenses against trust-targeted attacks. It represents nodes and edges as Gaussian distributions so that both semantic signals and epistemic uncertainty propagate through the graph neural network, enabling risk-aware trust decisions rather than overconfident guesses. To track how trust evolves, it layers hybrid absolute-Gaussian-hourglass positional encoding with Kolmogorov-Arnold network-based unbiased multi-head attention, then applies an ordinary differential equation-based residual learning module to jointly model abrupt shifts and smooth trends. Robust adaptive ensemble coefficient analysis prunes or down-weights suspicious interactions using complementary cosine and Jaccard similarity, curbing reputation laundering, sabotage, and on-off attacks. On two signed Bitcoin trust networks, DGTEN delivers standout gains where it matters most: in single-timeslot prediction on Bitcoin-OTC, it improves MCC by +12.34% over the best dynamic baseline; in the cold-start scenario on Bitcoin-Alpha, it achieves a +25.00% MCC improvement, the largest across all tasks and datasets; while under adversarial on-off attacks, it surpasses the baseline by up to +10.23% MCC. These results endorse the unified DGTEN framework.