An EDA-based community detection in complex networks

Abstract

Communities are basic units of complex networks and understanding of their structure help us to understand the structure of a network. Communities are groups of nodes that have many links inside and few links outside them. Community detection in a network can be modeled as an optimization problem. We can use some measures such as Modularity and Community Score for evaluating the quality of a partition of nodes. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for detecting communities in networks based on an Estimation of Distribution Algorithm (EDA) with the assumption that the problem variables are independent. EDAs are those evolutionary algorithms that build and sample the probabilistic models of selected solutions instead of using crossover and mutation operators. In this paper, we assess our algorithm by synthetic and real data sets and compare it with other community detection algorithms.