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Structural balance in signed digraphs: considering transitivity to measure balance in graphs constructed by using different link signing methods

Structural balance theory assumes triads in networks to gravitate towards stable configurations. The theory has been verified for undirected graphs. Since real-world networks are often directed, we introduce a novel method for considering both transitivity and sign consistency for calculating balance in signed digraphs. We test our approach on graphs that we constructed by using different methods for identifying edge signs: natural language processing to infer signs from underlying text data, and self-reported survey data. Our results show that for various social contexts and edge sign detection methods, balance is moderately high, ranging from 67.5% to 92.4%.