Preliminaries

Evolution of Balanced Triads

Real-world signed networks contain various types of balanced triads that satisfy balance theory.

We examine how well the triads generated over time in four real-world DSN datasets hold to balance theory. The x-axis in Figure 9 represents time ranges accumulated in increments of 20% from the beginning; additionally, the left y-axis shows the proportion of balanced triads among the total number of triads generated in each time range (i.e., the line graph), and the right y-axis displays the absolute number of balanced triads generated in each time range (i.e., the bar graph). From Figure 9, we can observe that as time goes over, the absolute number of balanced triads increases, and consequently, the proportion they represent within the network consistently remains high (avg. 89.6%). 

In summary, throughout the entire evolutionary process of DSN, not only does the count of balanced triads consistently increase, but it also maintains a high proportion within the network.