# An Efficient Local Search Approach for Polarized Community Discovery in Signed Networks Source: [An Efficient Local Search Approach for Polarized Community Discovery in Signed Networks]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-03-11T05:00:04.181Z Authors: Linus Aronsson, Morteza Haghir Chehreghani Published: 2025-02-04T10:22:01.000Z ## Abstract Signed networks, where edges are labeled as positive or negative to represent friendly or antagonistic interactions, provide a natural framework for analyzing polarization, trust, and conflict in social systems. Detecting meaningful group structures in such networks is crucial for understanding online discourse, political divisions, and trust dynamics. A key challenge is to identify communities that are internally cohesive and externally antagonistic, while allowing for neutral or unaligned vertices. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying $k$ polarized communities that addresses a major limitation of prior methods: their tendency to produce highly size-imbalanced solutions. We introduce a novel optimization objective that avoids such imbalance. In addition, it is well known that approximation algorithms based on local search are highly effective for clustering signed networks when neutral vertices are not allowed. We build on this idea and design the first local search algorithm that extends to the setting with neutral vertices while scaling to large networks. By connecting our approach to block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe optimization, we prove a linear convergence rate, enabled by the structure of our objective. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in solution quality, while remaining competitive in computational efficiency. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Polarized Community Discovery on WikiC](): Polarized Community Discovery; WikiC; POL Score: 190.8. - [Polarized Community Discovery on BTC](): Polarized Community Discovery; BTC; POL Score: 29. - [Polarized Community Discovery on REF](): Polarized Community Discovery; REF; POL: 146.1. - [Polarized Community Discovery on WikiV](): Polarized Community Discovery; WikiV; POL Score: 62.3. - [Polarized Community Discovery on SD](): Polarized Community Discovery; SD; POL: 75.9. - [Polarized Community Discovery on WikiP](): Polarized Community Discovery; WikiP; POL Score: 82. - [Polarized Community Discovery on EP](): Polarized Community Discovery; EP; POL: 127.8. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()