A Node Classification-Based Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm for Community Detection in Complex Networks

Multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have been widely used in community detection in recent years. However, most of the existing MOEA-based ones adopted the same search strategies for all nodes and ignored the differences between the nodes. In fact, the nodes in a complex network have different structural characteristics and are of different importance during the search process of the community detection problem. To this end, in this article, a node classification-based search scheme is first proposed, where different kinds of nodes are searched in different ways. To be specific, the nodes in the network are classified into two types of nodes, candidate central (CC) nodes and noncentral (NC) nodes, by mapping the nodes into a structural similarity-based embedding space. The CC nodes are likely to be the centers of communities, and the rough structure can be searched quickly through activating the CC nodes. Then, the NC nodes are assigned to the communities with the activated central nodes. Based on the proposed scheme, a node classification-based MOEA named NCMOEA is then proposed. In NCMOEA, a mixed representation is designed to effectively encode the two different kinds of nodes. In addition, corresponding genetic operators are then suggested to search the two categories of nodes in different ways. Furthermore, an initialization strategy is also designed for initializing the population with high quality and good diversity. The experimental results on 15 real-world networks and several synthetic networks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed NCMOEA over nine representative algorithms for community detection.