Community detection algorithm based on artificial fish swarm optimization

Abstract

Community structure identification in complex networks has been an important research topic in recent years. Community detection can be viewed as an optimization problem in which an objective quality function that captures the intuition of a community as a group of nodes with better internal connectivity than external connectivity is chosen to be optimized. In this paper Artificial Fish Swarm optimization (AFSO) has been used as an effective optimization technique to solve the community detection problem with the advantage that the number of communities is automatically determined in the process. However, the algorithm performance is influenced directly by the quality function used in the optimization process. A comparison is conducted between different popular communities’ quality measures and other well-known methods. Experiments on real life networks show the capability of the AFSO to successfully find an optimized community structure based on the quality function used.