10,244 research outputs found
Applications of Structural Balance in Signed Social Networks
We present measures, models and link prediction algorithms based on the
structural balance in signed social networks. Certain social networks contain,
in addition to the usual 'friend' links, 'enemy' links. These networks are
called signed social networks. A classical and major concept for signed social
networks is that of structural balance, i.e., the tendency of triangles to be
'balanced' towards including an even number of negative edges, such as
friend-friend-friend and friend-enemy-enemy triangles. In this article, we
introduce several new signed network analysis methods that exploit structural
balance for measuring partial balance, for finding communities of people based
on balance, for drawing signed social networks, and for solving the problem of
link prediction. Notably, the introduced methods are based on the signed graph
Laplacian and on the concept of signed resistance distances. We evaluate our
methods on a collection of four signed social network datasets.Comment: 37 page
The Evolution of Beliefs over Signed Social Networks
We study the evolution of opinions (or beliefs) over a social network modeled
as a signed graph. The sign attached to an edge in this graph characterizes
whether the corresponding individuals or end nodes are friends (positive links)
or enemies (negative links). Pairs of nodes are randomly selected to interact
over time, and when two nodes interact, each of them updates its opinion based
on the opinion of the other node and the sign of the corresponding link. This
model generalizes DeGroot model to account for negative links: when two enemies
interact, their opinions go in opposite directions. We provide conditions for
convergence and divergence in expectation, in mean-square, and in almost sure
sense, and exhibit phase transition phenomena for these notions of convergence
depending on the parameters of the opinion update model and on the structure of
the underlying graph. We establish a {\it no-survivor} theorem, stating that
the difference in opinions of any two nodes diverges whenever opinions in the
network diverge as a whole. We also prove a {\it live-or-die} lemma, indicating
that almost surely, the opinions either converge to an agreement or diverge.
Finally, we extend our analysis to cases where opinions have hard lower and
upper limits. In these cases, we study when and how opinions may become
asymptotically clustered to the belief boundaries, and highlight the crucial
influence of (strong or weak) structural balance of the underlying network on
this clustering phenomenon
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