A New Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm for Community Detection in Dynamic Complex Networks

Abstract

Community detection in dynamic networks is an important research topic and has received an enormous amount of attention in recent years. Modularity is selected as a measure to quantify the quality of the community partition in previous detection methods. But, the modularity has been exposed to resolution limits. In this paper, we propose a novel multiobjective evolutionary algorithm for dynamic networks community detection based on the framework of nondominated sorting genetic algorithm. Modularity density which can address the limitations of modularity function is adopted to measure the snapshot cost, and normalized mutual information is selected to measure temporal cost, respectively. The characteristics knowledge of the problem is used in designing the genetic operators. Furthermore, a local search operator was designed, which can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of community detection. Experimental studies based on synthetic datasets show that the proposed algorithm can obtain better performance than the compared algorithms.