Forming Compatible Teams in Signed Networks

The problem of team formation in a social network asks for a set of individuals who not only have the required skills to perform a task but who can also communicate effectively with each other. Existing work assumes that all links in a social network are positive, that is, they indicate friendship or collaboration between individuals. However, it is often the case that the network is signed, that is, it contains both positive and negative links, corresponding to friend and foe relationships. Building on the concept of structural balance, we provide definitions of compatibility between pairs of users in a signed network, and algorithms for computing it. We then define the team formation problem in signed networks, where we ask for a compatible team of individuals that can perform a task with small communication cost. We show that the problem is NP-hard even when there are no communication cost constraints, and we provide heuristic algorithms for solving it. We present experimental results with real data to investigate the properties of the different compatibility definitions, and the effectiveness of our algorithms.