Multiobjective Group Search Optimization Approach for Community Detection in Networks

Abstract

Various evolving approaches have been extensively applied to evolve densely connected communities in complex networks. However these techniques have been primarily single objective optimization techniques, which optimize only a specific feature of the network missing on other important features. Multiobjective optimization techniques can overcome this drawback by simultaneously optimizing multiple features of a network. This paper proposes MGSO, a multiobjective variant of Group Search Optimization (GSO) algorithm to globally search and evolve densely connected communities. It uses inherent animal food searching behavior of GSO to simultaneously optimize two negatively correlated objective functions and overcomes the drawbacks of single objective based CD algorithms. The algorithm reduces random initializations which results in fast convergence. It was applied on 6 real world and 33 synthetic network datasets and results were compared with varied state of the art community detection algorithms. The results established show the efficacy of MGSO to find accurate community structures.