Signed Social Networks: A Survey

People hold both sorts of emotions-positive and negative against each other. Online social media serves as a platform to show these relationships, whether friendly or unfriendly, like or dislike, agreement or dissension, trust or distrust. These types of interactions lead to the emergence of Signed Social Networks (SSNs) where positive sign represents friend, like, trust, agreement and negative sign represents foe, dislike, distrust and disagreement. Although an immense body of work has been dedicated to the field of social networks; the field of SSNs remains not much explored. This survey first frames the concept of signed networks and offers a brief discourse on the two most prevalent theories of social psychology applied to study them. Then, we address the various state-of-the-art issues which relates the real world scenarios with signed networks. Grounded along the network attributes, this survey talks about the different metrics used to analyze these networks and the real world datasets used for observational purposes. This paper, makes an attempt to follow the contours of research in the area to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of SSNs elaborating the open research areas.