Community Detection in Dynamic Social Networks Based on Multiobjective Immune Algorithm

Community structure is one of the most important properties in social networks, and community detection has received an enormous amount of attention in recent years. In dynamic networks, the communities may evolve over time so that pose more challenging tasks than in static ones. Community detection in dynamic networks is a problem which can naturally be formulated with two contradictory objectives and consequently be solved by multiobjective optimization algorithms. In this paper, a novel multiobjective immune algorithm is proposed to solve the community detection problem in dynamic networks. It employs the framework of nondominated neighbor immune algorithm to simultaneously optimize the modularity and normalized mutual information, which quantitatively measure the quality of the community partitions and temporal cost, respectively. The problem-specific knowledge is incorporated in genetic operators and local search to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Experimental studies based on four synthetic datasets and two real-world social networks demonstrate that our algorithm can not only find community structure and capture community evolution more accurately but also be more steadily than the state-of-the-art algorithms.