The Hierarchy Structure in Directed and Undirected Signed Networks

Abstract

The concept of social stratification and hierarchy among human dates is back to the origin of human race. Presently, the growing reputation of social networks has given us with an opportunity to analyze these well-studied phenomena over different networks at different scales. Generally, a social network could be defined as a collection of actors and their interactions. In this work, we concern ourselves with a particular type of social networks, known as trust networks. In this type of networks, there is an explicit show of trust (positive interaction) or distrust (negative interaction) among the actors. In a social network, actors tend to connect with each other on the basis of their perceived social hierarchy. The emergence of such a hierarchy within a social community shows the manner in which authority manifests in the community. In the case of signed networks, the concept of social hierarchy can be interpreted as the emergence of a tree-like structure comprising of actors in a top-down fashion in the order of their ranks, describing a specific parent-child relationship, viz. child trusts parent. However, owing to the presence of positive as well as negative interactions in signed networks, deriving such “trust hierarchies” is a non-trivial challenge. We argue that traditional notions (of unsigned networks) are insufficient to derive hierarchies that are latent within signed networks.