A survey on network community detection based on evolutionary computation

Abstract

Uncovering community structures of a complex network can help us to understand how the network functions. Over the past few decades, network community detection has attracted growing research interest from many fields. Many community detection methods have been developed. Network community structure detection can be modelled as optimisation problems. Due to their inherent complexity, these problems often cannot be well solved by traditional optimisation methods. For this reason, evolutionary algorithms have been adopted as a major tool for dealing with community detection problems. This paper presents a survey on evolutionary algorithms for network community detection. The evolutionary algorithms in this survey cover both single objective and multiobjective optimisations. The network models involve weighted/unweighted, signed/unsigned, overlapping/non-overlapping and static/dynamic ones.