Genetic algorithm-based community detection in large-scale social networks

Abstract

Communities in social networks are the essential feature which may be considered as a potential parameter in modeling the behavior of the social entities. Detection of communities has attracted a lot of attention in research in social network analysis. It is one of the major challenging problems as it involves high complexity in processing complex web structure. In fact, this problem can be considered as a NP-complete problem in large-scale networks, as this problem is somewhat reducible to the clique problem in graph theory. A number of meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed to explore the hidden communities. Most of these algorithms have considered the modularity of the network as their objective function. But, the aspect of optimizing the value of modularity is associated with a problem known as resolution limit, where the size of the detected communities depends on the number of edges existing in the network. In this paper, a genetic algorithm-based community detection has been proposed where an efficient single objective function based on similarity matrix has been devised. The similarity index between each pair of nodes has been calculated in a distributed manner over multiple computing nodes. Similarity index proposed in this paper is based on the topological structure of the network. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is examined by comparing the performance with other state-of-the-art community detection algorithms applied over some real-world network datasets.