Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing (2019) 10:175–186

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-017-0630-1

ORIGINAL RESEARCH

Sparse network embedding for community detection and sign

prediction in signed social networks
Baofang Hu1,2,3 · Hong Wang1,3 · Xiaomei Yu1,3 · Weihua Yuan1,3 · Tianwen He1,3

Received: 28 July 2017 / Accepted: 14 November 2017 / Published online: 27 November 2017
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2017

Abstract
Network embedding is an important pre-process for analysing large scale information networks. Several network embedding
algorithms have been proposed for unsigned social networks. However, these methods cannot be simply migrate to signed
social networks which have both positive and negative relationships. In this paper, we present our signed social network
embedding model which is based on the word embedding model. To deal with two kinds of links, we define two relation-
ships: neighbour relationship and common neighbour relationship, as well as design a bias random walk procedure. In order
to further improve interpretation of the representation vectors, the follow-proximally-regularized-leader online learning
algorithm is introduced to the traditional word embedding framework to acquire sparse representations. Extensive experi-
ments were carried out to compare our algorithm with three state-of-the-art methods for community detection and sign
prediction tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm performs better than the comparison algorithms
on most signed social networks.

Keywords Signed social network · Network embedding · Word embedding · Sparse representation · Follow-proximally-
regularized-leader

1 Introduction in EBay and Amazon, and likes in YouTube). Voting plays a

critical role to help visitors in the judgement of what is trust-
In recent years, social networks have developed rapidly and worthy (Andrade et al. 2012; Zhang and Liu 2015). These
most of them have voting features (e.g., comments in Slash- networks can be modelled as signed social networks which
dot news review site, voting in Wikipedia, product reviews contain trust and distrust relationships. These relationships
can be useful in various tasks, such as recommendations,
clustering and attitude prediction and have been applied in
* Hong Wang
wanghong106@163.com many other fields (Luo and Liu 2014; Li et al. 2014, 2015a,
b, Li 2018; Zheng et al. 2015; Yu et al. 2016). Online social
Baofang Hu
hbf0509@126.com networks usually involve millions of nodes and are harder to
store and calculate. So representation learning on social net-
Xiaomei Yu
970231168@qq.com works have attracted increasing attention in both aca-demia
and industry.
Weihua Yuan
156047662@qq.com Motived by the development of deep learning in the NLP
(natural language processing) area (Mikolov et al. 2013; Le
Tianwen He
sdsfhtw@163.com and Mikolov 2014; Levy et al. 2015), many network embed-
ding methods have been proposed (Perozzi et al. 2014; Tang
1
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong et al. 2015; Grover and Leskovec 2016; Wang et al. 2016;
Normal University, Jinan 250014, China Liao et al. 2017), and show promising performance for vari-
2
School of Information Technology, Shandong Women’s ous applications. However, most of the embedding methods
University, Jinan 250300, China do not incorporate the sign information of links and can not
3
Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory for Distributed simply migrate to signed social networks. Most recently,
Computer Software Novel Technology, Shandong Normal a few works (Wang et al. 2017; Yuan et al. 2017) which
University, Jinan 250014, China

13
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176
consider the sign information of links are proposed and per-
form effectively in different tasks. These works represent
nodes in signed social networks using dense low-dimen-
sional vectors.
In this paper, we propose a network embedding method
which can not only capture the sign information of links but
can also represent nodes using sparse low-dimensional vec-
tors. The major contributions of this paper are as follows:
– To define an improved biased random walk procedure to
acquire nodes sequence which incorporate positive and
negative relationships;
– Add sparse constraint into network embedding and
innovatively employ the follow-the-proximally-regula-
rized-leader (FTRL-Proximal) algorithm instead of SGD
(stochastic gradient descent) to original word embedding
framework to obtain sparse network embedding.
– Conduct extensive experiments on signed social networks
to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed frame-
work.
The rest of paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2 gives
some related works. Section 3 introduces the theory of
word embedding in the natural language process area and
our proposed model is presented in Sect. 4. Section 5 shows
the experimental analysis and conclusions are finally drawn
in Sect. 6.
2 Related work
2.1 Sign network analysis
signed social network research has attracted wide attention
(Kunegis et al. 2010; Leskovec et al. 2010a; Chiang et al.
2013; Zheng and Skillicorn 2015). There are two basic theo-
ries in signed social network which are the structure balance
theory (Heider 1946) and the status theory (Leskovec et al.
2010b). The balance theory is the key assumption which is
widely used to analyse signed social networks.
Community structure detection and sign prediction are
two fundamental tasks in signed social networks and the
widely adopted method is the Laplacian spectral method.
Kunegis et al. (2010) extended spectral algorithms to signed
social networks and proposed a spectral method based on
the signed Laplacian. They showed that by dividing signed
social networks into two groups with the signed Laplase ker-
nel, this was similar to the ratio cut in unsigned social net-
works. Chiang et al. (2013) gave a definition of social imbal-
ance (MOIs) based on l-cycles in signed social networks and
proposed a community detecting and sign predicting method
based on spectral Laplacian. Zheng and Skillicorn (2015)
developed two spectral approaches to model and analyse
13
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B. Hu et al.
signed graphs based on the random walk normalized Lapla-
cian. However, the time complexity of spectral methods is at
least quadratic to the number of vertices, and very expensive
for networks with millions of nodes.
2.2 Network embedding
With the boom in deep learning, a remarkable word embed-
ding framework called word2vec is proposed. It is proved
that the embedding vectors derived from the model preserve
the syntactic and semantic relations between words under
simple linear operations (Mikolov et al. 2013; Li et al. 2014;
Levy et al. 2015).
Word embedding conforms well to the representation
requirement in large-scale social networks and provides
a new concept in the study of social networks. DeepWalk
(Perozzi et al. 2014), LINE (Tang et al. 2015), node2vec
(Grover and Leskovec 2016) and SDNE (Wang et al. 2015)
are proposed respectively. The first three algorithms are
based on shallow neural network which are easy to train.
SDNE is based on deep neural network which can keep more
information. The four works are all designed for unsigned
social networks. Meanwhile, some works (Liao et al. 2017)
learn the network embedding by means of the node attribute
information for specific tasks.
There are two network embedding method based on deep
learning (Wang et al. 2017; Yuan et al. 2017) which are
designed for signed social networks. The first (Yuan et al.
2017) adopts the log-bilinear model to combine the edge
sign information and acquire the node representations. The
second (Wang et al. 2017) introduces virtual nodes into the
signed social network and only considers the nodes whose
2-hop networks are all positive links, that will insert a large
number of nodes which should be trained. The two are all
based on deep network which are hard to train. The repre-
sentation vectors of the aforementioned network embedding
algorithms are dense and lack of interpretability.
In this paper, we explore sparse constraints and shallow
neural network to signed social network embedding.
3 Word embedding
Our model is based on the skip-gram with negative-sampling
training method (SGNS) in word embedding (Mikolov et al.
2013). SGNS model utilizes word-context matrix to predict the
surrounding context of a given word. In the following we give
a brief review of the word-context matrix and SGNS model.
3.1 Word‑context matrix
Given a training corpus D and word vocabularies V, we can
get word sequences which contain the relationships of each
Sparse network embedding for community detection and sign prediction in signed social networks 177
word w ∈ Vw with its surrounding words. The surrounding
words which fall in the fixed-sized windows centered at w
are called context words and each context word is denoted
c ∈ Vc.
#(w, c) is the number of all word-context pairs in a
corpus D. N(w, c) of different (w, c) constitute the word-
context matrix and #(w, c) is the cth row and wth column
∑ ∑
of the matrix. #(w) = c #(w, c) , N(c) = w #(w, c) ,
∑ ∑
�D� = w c N(w, c).
3.2 SGNS model
The goal of word embedding is to seek appropriate vec-
tors 𝐰 ∈ Rd and 𝐜 ∈ Rd , where d s the dimension of vec-
tors space, to meet some pre-defined criterion. In the SGNS
model, the pre-defined criteria are to predict context words
for a given central word w. As shown by Levy and Goldberg
(2014), the local objective function for a given pair (w, c) is
defined in Eq. 1.
Ls(w, c) = #(w, c)log𝜎sim(𝐰, 𝐜) − kEcN ∼PD log𝜎(−sim(𝐰, 𝐜N ))
(1)
The first part in Eq. 1 represents the co-occurrence between
w and c within a context window. The second part is based
on the negative sampling. Where, k is the number of nega-
tively sampled words and cN is the negative sampled context.
To simplify analysis, PD is set to the empirical unigram dis-
tribution PD (c) = #(c) (Levy and Goldberg 2014).
|D|
𝜎(x) = 1
is the sigmoid function. sim(𝐰, 𝐜) is the distance
1+e−x
of the embedding vectors and it can be cosine similarity or
any other metrics.
The global objective function is the summation in the
corpus as shown in Eq. 2. W and C are the word and context
embedding matrix, whose column entries are 𝐰 and 𝐜 respec-
tively. The objective function is trained utilizing stochastic
gradient updates algorithm.
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
Γ = max w∈V c∈V Ls(w, c) = max w∈V c∈V
W,C W,C
4 Proposed model
We aim at representing nodes in signed social networks
using sparse low-dimensional vectors, which can intuitively
represent some kind of network structure such as commu-
nity structure and neighbour relationships. More formally,
let G = (V, E) , where G is a signed social network, V is
the nodes set of the network, and E is its edges set which
have positive or negative weights. Let f ∶ V → Rd be the
mapping function from nodes to vectors, d is a parameter
specifying the number of dimensions of our vector repre-
sentation. Our goal is to learn the mapping function f which
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maximally keeps structure information and sign information
in signed social networks. A biased random walk is executed
on signed social networks based on structure information to
produce nodes sequences which will be the input of the word
embedding framework. In the embedding process, the SGNS
model and the FTRL-Proximal optimization algorithm are
adopted to acquire the objective sparse low-dimensional net-
work embedding vectors. In the following section we intro-
duce the network structure information in the signed social
networks, biased random walk procedure and optimization
algorithm of our proposed algorithm.
4.1 Network structure information in signed social
network
There are two kinds of network structure information in
signed social networks, neighbour and common neighbour
relationships and these are defined below.
Neighbour relationship Structure balance theory is a rec-
ognized standard of signed social networks, proposed by
Heider (1946). The possible ways in which triangles on three
individuals can be signed are as shown in Fig. 1. In Heider’s
theory, T1 and T2 are balanced and T3 and T4 are unbal-
anced. Davis (1967) extended the theory and proposed weak
structural balance theory, in which T4 is also permissible.
In real signed social networks, the triads T2 consisting of
two enemies with a common friend are much more than the
triads T4 in which three individuals are all enemies to each
other. The statistical results of the counts of four kinds of
triads on three real signed social networks (Slashdot news
review site, Epinions consumer review site and Wikipedia
vote site) are shown in Table 1 (Leskovec et al. 2010a).
From above investigation, we can find an enemy’s enemy
is likely to be a friend. Therefore, we can design a biased
random walk in signed social network, in which a walker
selects the next node in two different ways. Not only a friend
#(w, c)log𝜎sim(𝐰, 𝐜) − kEcN ∼PD log𝜎(−sim(𝐰, 𝐜N )) (2)
but also enemy’s enemy may be selected as the next node.
However, propagation of distrust, unlike trust, is a tricky
issue. Enemy’s enemy is not necessarily a friend, while a
Fig. 1  Undirected signed triads relations (Heider 1946)
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178 B. Hu et al.

Table 1  Descriptions of three datasets and number of balanced and

unbalanced undirected triads in real signed social networks
Epinions Slashdot Wikipedia

Nodes 131,828 82,144 7118

Edges 840,799 549,202 103,747
− Edges 0.15 0.23 0.21
+ Edges 0.85 0.77 0.79
T1 (+ + +) 11,640,257 12,66,646 555,300 Fig. 2  Illustration of the biased random walk procedure in our algo-
T2 (– +) 94,7855 10,9303 163,328 rithm. The walker now is resting on node s and evaluating its next
node h. Dotted line means negative relations, solid line means posi-
T3 (+ + −) 698,023 115,884 63,425 tive relations. Orange lines with arrow mean the next possible step
T4 (− − −) 89,272 16,272 8479

friend of a friend can be considered trustworthy. So we can-
not select the next hop in the crude way and should utilize
the common neighbour relation mentioned below.
Common neighbour relationship Common neighbour
relationships involve two kinds of sets: friend set F(w) and
enemy set E(w). Intuitively, if two individual friend sets have
a larger overlap area, they tend to be best friends. Rather, if
one’s enemy set which covers a large percent of the area of
another individual friend set, the relationship between them
will be weak and even negative. It is consistent with the
definition of community in signed social network. There are
more positive links within the same community and more
negative links between different communities (Gmez et al.
2009).
Based on common neighbour relationships, we define
a local common relation similarity between node s and its
neighbour node h as following:
∑ ∑
ls(s, h) =
r∈F(s)∩F(h)
wsr −
m∈E(s)∩F(h)
wsm
where F(s) is the friend set of node s while E(s) is the enemy
set. wij means the weight of the link from i to j. The first part
of Eq. 3 is the overlapping degree between friend sets. The
second part is the overlapping degree between the enemy
set and the friend set.
4.2 Biased Random Walk procedure on signed
social networks
Here we defined a biased random walk procedure based on
neighbour relations and common neighbour relationship as
shown in 4.1 to acquire nodes sequence.
Formally, given a source node S, we denote every ran-
dom walker walks on the network at a fixed step size l. Let
ti denote the ith node in the path, walking from source node
S and t0 = S . Node ti is selected as the next node by the fol-
lowing probability:
{ 𝜋vx
| if (v, x) ∈ E
P(ti = x|ti−1 = v ) = Z (4)
0 otherwise
where 𝜋vx is the transition probability between nodes v and
x, and Z is the normalized constant. Because links have
positive and negative weights, we define a biased random
walk procedure with two parameters p and q to guide the
random walker. As shown in Fig. 2, a walker now resides
at the current node s and needs to decide the next node h.
So it evaluates the transition probability Psh on edges (s, h)
leading from s.
Based on the neighbour relationships in the signed social
networks, when the walker steps from node s they can select
not only its positive neighbours a or b+ but also an enemy of
its enemy (e.g. b′). The choice of b′ as the next node depends
on the value of ls(s, b� ) in Eq. 3. If ls(s, b� ) > 0 , the walker
(3) choose b′ as the next hop and add an virtual edge (s, b� ) to
E(wsb > 0). Conversely, if ls(s, b� ) < 0, b′ is abandoned and
the next node from current node s will be reselect.
In signed social networks, a walker can select a neigh-
bor node guided by the extended transition probability p̃ ik
as following:
�wik �
� �
p̃ ik =
∑n
�w � (5)
� ij �
j∈nbs(i) � �
However, k is an enemy of i when wik < 0 . In this case,
we choose an enemy of k as the next node. We define the
unnormalized transition probability 𝜋sh from node s to h as
following:

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Sparse network embedding for community detection and sign prediction in signed social networks 179

⎧p⋅ ∑
wsh
wsh > 0
⎪ �wsh �
⎪
K∈nbs(s)
�wsk � �wkh �
𝜋sh = ⎨ q ⋅ ∑
�wsi �
⋅ ∑
�wkj �
wsk < 0andwkh < 0and wsh = 0andls(s, h) > 0 (6)
⎪ i∈nbs(s) j∈negativenbs(k)
⎪0 otherwise
⎩

where p and q are adjustable parameters which guide the Given a sequence of gradients gt ∈ Rd , SGD performs the
walker by selecting one of its friends or an enemy of its update:
enemy as the next hop. Wt+1 = Wt − 𝜂t gt (7)
where 𝜂t is a non-increasing learning rate.
4.3 Sparse network embedding The FTRL-Proximal algorithm instead uses the update as
follows:
Traditional SGNS model encodes every word vector into
low-dimensional dense vectors. The reason for this is that the
1� �
t
𝜎 W − Ws �
2
SGNS employs SGD (stochastic gradient descent) as the opti- Wt+1 = arg min(g1∶t ⋅ W +
2 s=1 s � �2 + 𝜆1 ‖W‖1 )
mization strategy and the approximate gradient of SGD used
W
(8)
at each update is very noisy and the value of each entry in the
where 𝜎s is the learning-rate and 𝜎1∶t = 1∕𝜂t . 𝜆1 is the hyper-
vector can be easily moved away from zero by those fluctua-
parameter that controls the degree of regularization.
tions. We need to seek other online optimization algorithms to ∑
If we put Zt−1 = g1∶t−1 − t−1 𝜎 W , at the beginning of
replace the SGD to obtain sparse representation. Fortunately, s=1 s s
round t we update by letting Zt = Zt−1 + gt + ( 𝜂1 − 𝜂 1 )Wt ,
there have been several studies concerning the online optimi- t t−1

zation algorithms that target such l1 - norm objectives (Xiao and solve for wt+1 in closed form on a bases by:
2010; Mcmahan 2011; Wang et al. 2015; Liu et al. 2016). It {
0 if ||zt,i || ≤ 𝜆1
has been proven that the follow-the-proximally-regularized- wt+1,i = (9)
−𝜂t (zt,i − sgn(zt,i )𝜆1 ) otherwise
leader (FTRL-Proximal) model has the characteristic of high
efficiency and stability compared with the other two algo-
rithms. In this paper, we propose to employ FTRL-Proximal
algorithm (Mcmahan 2011) in word2vec framework to pro-
duce the sparse representations.

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180 B. Hu et al.

4.4 Sparse Node2Vec in signed social networks

Algorithm (sparse‑node2vec‑SN)

13

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Sparse network embedding for community detection and sign prediction in signed social networks 181

The pseudocode for Sparse-node2vec-SN is given in Algo- ̄ −1 W . D

rithm 1. In the random walk procedure, to avoid the impact
of the starting nodes on the final walk sequences, a ran-
dom walker starts, simulated from every node. The select-
ing strategy of next node is described in bias random walk
procedure. Firstly, a neighbour (positive or negative) Vcurr
of current node is sampled based on the transition pos-
sibility. Secondly, if a negative neighbour is chosen, one
enemy of the negative neighbour will replace current Vcurr
and the local similarity ls should be judged. If ls(curr, Vcurr )
is negative, Vcurr should be randomly chosen again. SGNS
framework is still employed and the optimization algorithm
is replaced with FTRL algorithm. During every phase of the
algorithm, the random walk simulations and optimization
using FTRL, is parallelizable.
4.5 Variants of sparse‑node2vec‑SN
There are two variants of sparse-node2vec-SN as following:
sparse-node2vec When the algorithm is implemented on
unsigned social networks, the elements wij in the adjacent
matrix are positive or zero. In this situation, q can be any
value but make no difference. The algorithm sparse-node-
2vec-SN will degenerate into sparse-node2vec.
sparse-node2vec+ The value of q can be zero and in this
situation the negative links are cast away. The sparse-node-
2vec+ is suitable not only for signed social networks but
also unsigned social networks. When used in unsigned social
networks, it is equivalent to sparse-node2vec.
5 Experiments
The output of our model is merely a representation form
of nodes, so it can be the input of any downstream net-
work analysis task such as community detection and sign
prediction.
5.1 Experimental setup
Our experiments evaluate the vector embedding obtained
through sparse-node2vec-SN on different tasks: community
detection and sign prediction for links. Spectral algorithms
are widely-used to represent signed social networks. For
both tasks, we evaluate the performance of our algorithm
against three quintessential spectral algorithms, a signed
social network embedding algorithm based on deep neural
network and a variant of our model, without the sparsity
process.
Signed normalized Laplacian L̄ rw (Kunegis et al. 2010):
This approach is extended from the spectral method.
L̄ rw = I − D ̄ is the extended degree matrix in signed
social networks. D ̄ = D+ + D− and W = W + − W − .
Normalized signed graph Laplacian Lsns (Zheng and Skil-
licorn 2015): Lsns = D ̄ −1 (D+ − D− − W). This algorithm
penalizes long positive edges and short negative edges.
Balanced normalized signed graph Laplacian Lbns (Zheng
and Skillicorn 2015) Lbns = D ̄ −1 (D+ − W).
SNE (Yuan et al. 2017) It adopts the log-bilinear model
and deep neural network. The algorithm uses the random
walk procedure on the original network. In this procedure, a
friend and an enemy have the same possibility to be chosen
as the next node.
node2vec-SN For further validating the impact of spar-
sity on improving the quality of the network embedding, we
adopt a network embedding algorithm without sparse pro-
cessing, node2vec-SN. In node2vec-SN, the adopted online
learning algorithm is SGD.
The hyper-parameters p, q in sparse-node2vec-SN are
learned using 10 − fold cross-validation on 10% labelled
data with a grid search over p, q ∈ {0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4}. For
all the spectral methods, we adopt the top k eigenvectors as
the network embedding.
5.2 Community detection
In this part, the proposed sparse-node2vec-SN algorithm
and comparative algorithms are tested on six real-world
signed social networks and several synthetic networks. For
detecting the community structures, we adopt the classical
K-means cluster method as the subsequent process for every
algorithm. In order to estimate the performance of differ-
ent algorithms for community detection, two widely used
metrics, improved modularity in signed networks (SQ) met-
ric (Gmez et al. 2009) and normalized mutual information
(NMI) metric (Wu and Huberman 2004), are adopted. SQ
can be used to evaluate the community detection quality on
the real-world signed social networks, because the ground
truth is unknown in most real-world networks. Conversely,
NMI is for synthetic signed social networks in which the
ground truth is known. The definitions of SQ and NMI are
as follows:
[ ( + + )]
1 ∑∑ wi wj w−i w−j
SQ = wij − − × 𝛿(Ci , Cj )
2w+ + 2w− i j 2w+ 2w−
(10)
∑ ∑
where w+i = w+ij , w−i = w−ij , w+ij and w−ij are the positive
j j
∑
and negative weights of the links. 2w+ = w+i ,
j
∑
2w− = w−i . 𝛿(Ci , Cj ) = 1,when i and j in the same com-
j

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182 B. Hu et al.

munity. 𝛿(Ci , Cj ) = 0 , when i and j in different From Table 3 we can see that, for the SPP and the GGS
communities. networks, all the algorithms can find the best community
Given two community structures A and B in the same net- structure. The two signed social networks are small in size.
work, and then let C be the confusion matrix whose element It is easy for the algorithms to find the optimal solutions.
Cij is the number of common nodes between community i in However, the algorithms based on deep learning some-
structure A and communityj in structure B. times performs worse than the other three spectral meth-
�CN� ods. The reason is that our algorithm is based on word
∑CA ∑CB
−2 i=1 j=1
Cij log ij
embedding technology in which nodes are represented in
Ci. C.j
NMI(A, B) = ∑ � � ∑ � C � (11) at least 16 dimensions space and this is inefficient for very
CA CB
small networks. Figures 3 and 4 show the worst commu-
Ci. .j
i=1
Ci. log N
+ j=1
C.j log N
nity structures obtained by our proposed algorithm when
experimenting on the SPP and the GGS networks.
where N is the number of nodes, CA (CB ) is the number of
For the other four networks, we can observed that the
communities in structure A(B) and Ci .(C. j) is the sum of ele-
maximum values and the averaged values obtained by our
ments of C in row i (column j).
proposed algorithm are higher than those obtained by the
rest of the algorithms, which indicates that the discovered
5.2.1 Testing on real‑world signed social networks
community structures are better than those discovered by
the comparative algorithms. All the experimental results
Six real-world signed social networks have been employed to
demonstrate that the proposed optimization model is effec-
test the community detection performances of the proposed
tive for the signed social network community detection
algorithm and the comparison algorithms. The statistics of
each network are given in Table 2, and only the ground truth
of SPP and GGS are known. Because the networks are all
small, in the experiments, d is set to 16 and each algorithm
has been independently tested for 30 times.

Table 2  Statistics of the signed social networks. E+ and E denote the

positive and negative edges, respectively
Network #Vertex #Edge #E+ #E− Refs.

SPP 10 45 18 27 Heider (1946)

GGS 16 58 29 29 Read (1954)
EGFR 329 779 515 264 Oda et al. (2005)
Macrophage 678 1425 947 478 Oda et al. (2004)
Yeast 690 1080 860 220 Milo et al. (2002)
E. coli 1461 3215 1879 1336 Shen-Orr et al. (2002) Fig. 3  The worst community structures of SPP detecting by our algo-
rithm

Table 3  Statistical results over Index Algorithm SPP GGS EGFR Macrophage Yeast E. coli
30 runs on the signed social
networks SQmax L̄ rw 0.4547 0.4530 0.2753 0.3010 0.5838 0.3696
Lsns 0.4547 0.4530 0.2731 0.2985 0.5879 0.3673
Lbns 0.4547 0.4530 0.2848 0.3028 0.5969 0.3753
SNE 0.4547 0.4530 0.2875 0.3240 0.6036 0.4100
node2vec-SN 0.4547 0.4530 0.2870 0.3236 0.6006 0.4034
sparse-node2vec-SN 0.4547 0.4530 0.2878 0.3244 0.6038 0.4032
SQavg L̄ rw 0.4532 0.4520 0.2678 0.2738 0.5321 0.3652
Lsns 0.454 0.4518 0.2635 0.2787 0.5434 0.3301
Lbns 0.4543 0.4526 0.2791 0.2921 0.5741 0.3631
SNE 0.4539 0.4516 0.2785 0.3164 0.5971 0.3883
node2vec-SN 0.4533 0.4421 0.2764 0.3043 0.5975 0.3864
sparse-node2vec-SN 0.4436 0.4428 0.2835 0.3189 0.5979 0.3908

Best results are highlighted in bold

13

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Sparse network embedding for community detection and sign prediction in signed social networks 183
Fig. 4  The worst community structures of GGS detecting by our
algorithm
Table 4  Parameter settings for the generated synthetic signed social
networks
Parameter Value Parameter Value
n 1000 10
smin
15 50
davg smax
40 0.7
dmax Pin
𝛾 2 P− [0.1:0.1:0.5]
𝛽 1 P+ [0.1:0.1:0.5]
problem while it seems that the sparsity constraint is indis-
pensable in these representations.
5.2.2 Testing on synthetic signed social networks
Here, several synthetic networks with different proper-
ties are constructed based on LFR model (Lancichinetti
et al. 2008). A random signed social network is labelled
as SN(n, davg , dmax ,𝛾, 𝛽, smin , smax , Pin , P− , P+ ) , where n is
the number of nodes, davg and dmax are average degree and
maximum degree , 𝛾 and respectively are exponents for the
power law distribution of the node degree and community
size, smin and smax are minimum and maximum community
size. smax is the probability of each node connecting other
nodes in the same community. When Pin < 0.5, the commu-
nity structures are mixed and hardly detected. P− and P+ are
two noise parameters to make the networks non-partitionable
and unbalanced. P− means the probability of negative edges
existing within communities while P+ represents that of
positive edges existing between communities. In the follow-
ing subsection, we generate artificial signed social networks
with the parameter settings shown in Table 4.
We make five group experiments to compare the perfor-
mance of our method and the other comparative algorithms
based on different levels of P− and P+. In each group, P+ is
set to a fixed value and P− is increased from 0.1 to 0.5 in the
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
step of 0.1. In the five group experiments, P+ is set to a fixed
value from 0.1 to 0.5. The real community structure in every
network is known and we adopt NMI as evaluation metric.
The experimental results are shown in Fig. 5.
As can be seen, community structures detected by the
algorithms have high similarity to the ground truth when
P− and P+ is both lower than 0.2. When P− and P+ increase,
communities are more ambiguous and harder to be detected.
Therefore, the performance of the four algorithms decreases.
However, we can find that our algorithm performs better
than the other three algorithms on most of networks.
From a much more comprehensive analysis on the five
groups of experiments, we can observe that all algorithms
are more sensitive to P− than P+ . In other words, given
P+ , the NMI changes more obviously as the value of P−
increases in the range from 0 to 0.4 compared with the same
situation of P+. This is because, spectral methods and our
sparse-node2vec-SN are all based on the statistical hypoth-
esis that the enemy of one’s enemy is likely to be a friend.
P− is the opposite the assumption. However, the NMI of our
algorithm decreases more slowly than others. This is due
to the common neighbour relationship which validates the
assumption in our algorithm.
5.3 Sign prediction
5.3.1 Datasets and experimental setting
We further test our algorithm and comparative algorithms
for sign prediction task on three large-scale signed social
networks as following. The descriptions of the three net-
works (Leskovec and Krevl 2014) are as shown in Table 1.
Slashdot Slashdot is a news review site, in which users
can tag each other as friends or foes. The network contains
friend links (positive links) and foe links (negative links)
between the users of Slashdot.
Epinions Epinions is an online product review site, in
which users can provide ratings to items. Users can provide
positive and negative ratings not only to products but also
to other reviewers.
Wikipedia In Wikipedia, any Wikipedia member may cast
a supporting or opposing vote to other admin users. Such
votes can be viewed as positive links and negative links.
We adopt the traditional random walk methodology
(only walking through positive links) to select 4000 nodes
from each dataset and then add negative links between the
selected nodes to construct new connected graphs as data-
sets. Each new dataset E is divided into two subsets: (i) train-
ing set ET is regarded as known information and, (ii) test set
EP is used for testing and the signs of links in this set are
labelled. It is obvious that, E = ET ∪ EP and ET ∩ EP = � .
We evaluate and compare these algorithms using a tenfold
13
184
Fig. 5  NMI of SN (1000, 15, 40, 2, 1, 10, 50, 0.7, P− , P+) obtained by different detection algorithms
cross-validation methodology. The sign prediction methods
of the four algorithms are described as follows:
Sparse-node2vec-SN, node2vec-SN and SNE The sign
prediction of the three algorithms is based on the Cosine
similarity of the vector representations.
f (u) ⋅ f (v)
Similarity(u, v) =
|f (u)| ⋅ |f (v)|
The resulting similarity ranges from −1 meaning an enemy
relationship, to 1 meaning a friend relationship, with 0
indicating no relationship, and in-between values indicat-
ing intermediate similarity or dissimilarity. Here, we set
d = 128, r = 15, l = 80, k = 10.
Spectral methods L̄ rw , Lsns , and Lbns To evaluate the
signed spectral approach, we use three graph kernels based
on the signed Laplacian matrix L̄ rw , Lsns , Lbns , and labelled
them as L.
̄ These kernels are computed with the reduced
eigenvalue decomposition of L̄ (d) = U ∧ U T only the top
d dimensional eigenvectors are kept. L̄ (k) ≈ U(k) ∧ U(k) T .
13
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
B. Hu et al.
While the top k dimensional eigenvectors contain zero
entries for links not present in the original graph, the
approximation L̄ (k) is nonzero at these entries, and the sign
of these entries can be used as a prediction for the sign of
missing links. The value of k is set to 128.
(12) 5.3.2 Experimental results
For measuring the prediction accuracy, we use three kinds
of accuracy: accuracy of all signs (Accuracy-all), accuracy
of positive links (Accuracy+) and accuracy of negative links
(Accuracy−). The experimental results are shown in Fig. 6.
As the results for sign prediction shown in Fig. 6, the
general observation that the sparse network embedding in
signed social networks performs better than the other algo-
rithms, especially when the overall accuracy is concerned.
Accuracy for predicting positive links and negative links
varies widely, particularly in the three spectral methods. This
is because; the ratio of negative links is much lower than
Sparse network embedding for community detection and sign prediction in signed social networks 185
Fig. 6  Sign prediction accuracy in three signed social networks
positive links in the three datasets. Meanwhile, the reduc-
tion and reconstruction operations in spectral methods may
lose information and add noise. Our algorithm is based on
random walk in which the neighbour relationships are a con-
cern. This will ease the information loss. SNE performs best
when predicting the positive links while it performs worse
than our algorithm when predicting the negative links, espe-
cially in Slashdot. The reason for this is that sparse represen-
tation is traditionally viewed as a typical denoising method.
The sparse process in our algorithm can decrease the differ-
ence between predicting positive links and negative links.
6 Discussion and conclusion
Positive and negative links in signed social networks give
us more information about the users, which is very impor-
tant for recommendations and prediction tasks. The scale
of these complex networks is usually high. In this paper,
we design a signed social network embedding model based
on the word embedding model. To obtain the corpus, we
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
define a biased random walk procedure based on two rela-
tionships defined in this paper. Furthermore, we employ the
sparse process into our model to improve the quality and
efficiency of the representations. Empirically, we evaluated
the generated network representations in a variety signed
social networks and applications. The results demonstrate
substantial gains of our method compared with state-of-art
methods currently available.
In spite of the overall higher performance of our algo-
rithm, our algorithm is still more sensitive to negative noisy
information than positive noisy information. In our future
work, more efforts will be made to reduce this kind of sen-
sitivity in community detection and sign prediction of signed
social network.
Acknowledgements This work is partly funded by the National Nature
Science Foundation of China (nos. 61672329, 61373149, 61472233,
61572300, and 81273704), Shandong Provincial Project for Science
and Technology Development (no. 2014GGX101026), Shandong Pro-
vincial Project of Education Scientific Plan (no. ZK1437B010), Tais-
han Scholar Program of Shandong Province (nos. TSHW201502038
and 20110819), and Shandong Provincial Project of Exquisite Course
(nos. 2012BK294, 2013BK399, and 2013BK402).
13
186 B. Hu et al.

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