Structural Balance Computation in Signed Networks by Using Multifactorial Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization

The signed network has received widespread attention because it can well reflect the cooperation and conflict relationship. Structural balance is an important global feature in signed networks, which can well reflect the structural characteristics of the network. Existing structural balance calculation algorithms define the global and local balance computation problems as an optimization problem, and then optimize their respective objective functions through optimization algorithms, but these algorithms ignore the correlation between the two problems. In this paper, we combine the multifactorial evolutionary algorithm and the discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm, and further propose the multifactorial discrete particle swarm optimization algorithm (MFDPSO). This algorithm designs the knowledge transfer function and optimization algorithm based on the correlation of the strong and weak structure balance and optimizes the two problems at the same time. The experimental results on 8 real networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the MFDPSO.