A novel genetic algorithm for overlapping community detection

Abstract

There is a surge of community detection on complex network analysis in recent years, since communities often play special roles in the network systems. However, many community structures are overlapping in real word. For example, a professor collaborates with researchers in different fields. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to discover overlapping communities. Different from conventional algorithms based on node clustering, our algorithm is based on edge clustering. Since edges usually represent unique relations among nodes, edge clustering will discover groups of edges that have the same characteristics. Thus nodes naturally belong to multiple communities. The proposed algorithm apply a novel genetic algorithm to cluster on edges. A scalable encoding schema is designed and the number of communities can be automatically determined. Experiments on both artificial networks and real networks validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the algorithm. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.