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Abstract:Signed graphs are equipped with both positive and negative edge weights, encoding pairwise correlations as well as anti-correlations in data. A balanced signed graph is a signed graph with no cycles containing an odd number of negative edges. Laplacian of a balanced signed graph has eigenvectors that map via a simple linear transform to ones in a corresponding positive graph Laplacian, thus enabling reuse of spectral filtering tools designed for positive graphs. We propose an efficient computation method to learn a balanced signed graph Laplacian directly from data. Specifically, extending a previous linear programming (LP) based sparse inverse covariance estimation method called CLIME, we formulate a new LP problem for each Laplacian column $i$, where the linear constraints restrict weight signs of edges stemming from node $i$, so that nodes of same / different polarities are connected by positive / negative edges. We derive a feasible CLIME parameter $\rho_i$ for each sign-constrained column problem. We solve the LP problem efficiently by tailoring a sparse LP method based on ADMM. We theoretically prove that the row / column updates produce a non-increasing objective sequence, and show that the iterations are terminated in a finite number of steps. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our balanced graph learning method outperforms competing methods and enables reuse of spectral filters, wavelets, and graph neural nets (GNN) constructed for positive graphs.

Submission history

From: Haruki Yokota [view email]
[v1] Mon, 2 Jun 2025 16:09:51 UTC (307 KB)
[v2] Tue, 1 Sep 2026 02:29:36 UTC (406 KB)