Reversing structural balance in signed networks

The transformation of imbalanced networks into balanced ones has been widely studied, but the reverse transformation of balanced structure has received little attention. A balanced structure may sometimes reflect undesirable collective action, and breaking this balance could be socially beneficial. In this paper, we study the reverse transformation of balanced structure and propose a model for reversing structural balance. We suggest a greedy algorithm and a memetic algorithm that break structural balance by changing node attributes. Experiments show that our algorithms can produce this reversed structural balance quite efficiently. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.