An Energy Function for Computing Structural Balance in Fully Signed Network

Structural balance in fully signed networks consisting of both individual attributes and social interactions has great importance on social computing, but its sociological or physical mechanisms still need further exploration, and its measurement is still lacking. In this article, we discuss the new mechanism of balance theory and design a new energy function to measure the global structural balance. An optimization algorithm that minimizes the energy function to detect the communities in structural balance is proposed as well, and experiment results show the excellent effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. An application on the investigated data from Shenzhen, China, is also provided to explain the social significance of structural balance.