On the Structural Balance Dynamics Under Perceived Sentiment

In this letter, we propose a continuous-time dynamics for social network that represents patterns of both amity and enmity through directed signed graphs. The introduction of discrepancies between true and perceived sentiments gives rise to a non-autonomous system and distinguishes itself from the prior models. We show that for almost all initial configurations, the system will evolve into at most four factions. Under some mild assumptions on the initial conditions, structural balance with at most two factions can be achieved, which extends the previous results for symmetric or normal initial configurations without considering the effect of perceived sentiment.