Network Structural Balance Analysis for Sina Microblog Based on Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

Research on structure balance of networks is of great importance for theoretical research and practical application, and received extensive attention of scholars from diverse fields in recent years. The computation and transformation of structure balance primarily aim at calculating the cost of converting an unbalanced network into a balanced network. In this paper, we proposed an efficient method to study the structure balance of the microblog network. Firstly, we model the structural balance of social network as a mathematical optimization problem. Secondly, we design an energy function incorporate with structure balance theory. Finally, considering the standard particle swarm optimization algorithm can not deal with discrete problem, we redefined the velocity and position updating rules of particles from a discrete perspective to solve the modeled optimization problem. Experiments on real data sets demonstrate our method is efficient.