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

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 relationships: 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 experiments 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.