Social Status Computation for Nodes of Overlapping Communities in Directed Signed Social Networks

Abstract

The exponential growth in signed social networks in recent years has garnered the interest of numerous researchers in the field. Social balance theory and status theory are the two most prevalent theories of signed social networks and are used for the same purpose. Many researchers have incorporated the concept of social balance theory into their work with community detection problems in order to gain a better understanding of these networks. Social balance theory is suitable for undirected signed social networks; however, it does not consider the direction of the ties formed among users. When dealing with directed signed social networks, researchers simply ignore the direction of ties, which diminishes the significance of the tie direction information. To overcome this, in this chapter we present a mathematical formulation for computing the social status of nodes based on status theory, termed the status factor, which is well suited for directed signed social networks. The status factor is used to quantify social status for each node of overlapping communities in a directed signed social network, and the feasibility of the proposed algorithm for this metric is well illustrated through an example.