A Mixed Representation-Based Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm for Overlapping Community Detection.

Abstract

Designing multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) for community detection in complex networks has attracted much attention of researchers recently. However, most of the existing methods focus on addressing the task of nonoverlapping community detection, where each node must belong to one and only one community. In fact, communities are often overlapped with each other in many real-world networks, thus it is necessary to design overlapping community detection algorithms. To this end, this paper proposes a mixed representation-based MOEA (MR-MOEA) for overlapping community detection. In MR-MOEA, a mixed individual representation scheme is proposed to fast encode and decode the overlapping divisions of complex networks. Specifically, this mixed representation consists of two parts: one represents all potential overlapping nodes and the other delegates all nonoverlapping nodes. These two parts evolve together to detect the overlapping communities of networks based on different updating strategies suggested in MR-MOEA. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm MR-MOEA on ten real-world complex networks and the experimental results demonstrate that MR-MOEA is superior over six representative algorithms for overlapping community detection.