An ILS algorithm to evaluate structural balance in signed social networks

Abstract

Evaluating balance in a social network has been a challenge for social network researchers. The degree of balance in a social group can be used as a tool to study whether and how this group evolves to a possible balanced state. In particular, the solution of the Correlation Clustering (CC) problem can be used as a criterion to measure the amount of balance in signed social networks, where positive (friendly) and negative (antagonistic) interactions take place. In this work, we provide an efficient solution of the CC problem by the use of the ILS metaheuristic. The proposed algorithm outperforms other solution strategies from literature in execution time, with the same solution quality.

Balance and frustration in signed networks

“…This dataset is based on all adminship elections before January 2008 in which Wikipedia users have voted for approval or disapproval of other users promotions to becoming administrators. We use an undirected version of the Wikipedia elections signed graph made publicly available in [62]. The four social signed networks are illustrated in Figure 2 where green and red edges represent positive and negative edges respectively.…”

Evaluating balancing on social networks through the efficient solution of correlation clustering problems

“…Based on the GRASP proposed by Drummond et al (2013), we have contributed to the efficient solution of the CC problem by developing sequential and parallel Iterated Local Search (ILS) (Lourenço et al 2003) metaheuristics. This work is an extention of the work presented in Levorato et al (2015), which highlighted preliminary results obtained through initial experiments. These findings motivated the execution of several other tests in order to achieve a detailed analysis of the clustering problems discussed in this work, focused on the application perspective.…”

“…Lately, we presented a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) (Feo and Resende 1995) implementation that provides an efficient solution to the CC problem in networks of up to 8000 vertices (Drummond et al 2013). Then, based on this method, we introduced sequential and parallel ILS (Iterated Local Search (Lourenço et al 2003)) procedures for the CC problem (Levorato et al 2015). In this work, besides providing a thorough analysis of ILS in comparison with other solution approaches, we focus on the application point of view, performing structural balance analysis on real-world signed social networks.…”

Computing Len for Exploring the Historical People's Social Network

“…In reality, however, social networks are rarely, structural balance theory has been developed extensively, e.g. weak structural balance, k-balance, and other different criteria to quantify and evaluate balance in a signed social network [10], [13], [14]. Researchers defined clustering problems on signed graphs can be used as a criteria to measure the degree of balance in social networks [15].…”

“…The web backend framework is Flask1.0.1 and the web UI framework is Reactjs16.3.2, antd3.4.4 and D3jsv4. Both our source code and demo system are publicly available online 13 .…”