Where is evolutionary computation going? A temporal analysis of the EC community

Abstract

Studying an evolving complex system and drawing some conclusions from it is an integral part of nature-inspired computing; being a part of that complex system, some insight can also be gained from our knowledge of it. In this paper we study the evolution of the evolutionary computation co-authorship network using social network analysis tools, with the aim of extracting some conclusions on its mechanisms. In order to do this, we first examine the evolution of macroscopic properties of the EC co-authorship graph, and then we look at its community structure and its corresponding change along time. The EC network is shown to be in a strongly expansive phase, exhibiting distinctive growth patterns, both at the macroscopic and the mesoscopic level.