Structural Balance in Fully Signed Networks

Node attributes play an important role in shaping network structures, but are generally ignored in transformations of structural balance. A fully signed network consisting of signs of edges and nodes expresses both properties of relationship and node attributes. In this article, we generalize the definition of structural balance in fully signed networks. We transform the unbalanced fully signed network by not only changing signs of edges but also changing the signs of nodes. We propose a memetic algorithm to transform unbalanced networks at the lowest cost. Experiments show that our algorithm can solve this problem efficiently, and different node attribute assignments may lead to different optimized structures. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.