Community detection in social networks with node attributes based on multi-objective biogeography based optimization

Abstract

Detecting communities in complex networks is one of the most important issues considered when analyzing these kinds of networks. A majority of studies in the field of community detection tend to detect communities through analyzing linkages of the networks. What this paper aims to achieve is to reach to a trade-off between similarity of nodes' attributes and density of connections in finding communities of social networks with node attributes. Since the community detection problem can be modeled as a seriously non-linear discrete optimization problem, we have hereby proposed a multi-objective discrete Biogeography Based Optimization (BBO) algorithm to find communities in social networks with node attributes. This algorithm uses the Pareto-based approach for community detection. Also, we introduced a new metric, SimAtt, to measure the similarity of node attributes in a community of a network and used it along with Modularity, which considers the linkage structure of a network to detect communities, as the two objective functions of the proposed method to be maximized. In the proposed method, a two phase sorting strategy is introduced which uses the non-dominated sorting and Crowding-distance to sort the generated solution of a population in each iteration. Moreover, this paper introduces a method for mutation probability approximation and uses a chaotic mechanism to dynamically tune the mutation probability in each iteration. Additionally, two novel strategies are introduced for mutation in unweighted and weighted networks. Since the final output of the proposed method is a set of non-dominated (Pareto-optimal) solutions, a metric named alpha_SAM is proposed to determine the best compromise solution among these non-dominated ones. Quantitative evaluations based on extensive experiments on 14 real-life data sets reveals that the method presented in this study achieves favorable results which are quite superior to other relevant algorithms in the literature.