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Chapter 11
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-9964-9.ch011
ABSTRACT
Community detection is a topic of great interest in complex network analysis. The basic problem is to
identify closely connected groups of nodes (i.e. the communities) from the networks of various objects
represented in the form of a graph. Often, the problem is expressed as an optimization problem, where
popular optimization techniques such as evolutionary computation techniques are utilized. The importance
of these approaches is increasing for efcient community detection with the rapidly growing networks.
The primary focus of this chapter is to study the applicability of such techniques for community detection.
Our study includes the utilization of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)
with their numerous variants developed specifcally for community detection. We have discussed several
issues related to community detection, GA, PSO and the major hurdles faced during the implication of
evolutionary approaches. In addition, the chapter also includes a detailed study of how these issues are
being tackled with the various developments happening in the domain.
1. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, representation of links among various objects present within the data in the form of network
is very common in many domains. Such network representation in modern-day data which include so-
cial network (Scott, 2012), ecological network (Newman, 2012), biological network (Sah et. al., 2014),
Evolutionary Computation
Techniques for Community
Detection in Social
Network Analysis
Abhishek Garg
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India
Anupam Biswas
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India
Bhaskar Biswas
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India