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An improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for simultaneously detecting separated and overlapping communities

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Abstract

In our previous work, a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MEA_CDPs) was proposed for detecting separated and overlapping communities simultaneously. However, MEA_CDPs has a couple of defects, like individuals cannot be transformed to community structure by the decoder when the quality of community structure is lower certain thresholds, many vertices with weak overlapping nature are identified as overlapping nodes, and the objective functions can not control the ratio of separated nodes to overlapping nodes. Therefore, in this paper, to overcome these defects, we improve MEA_CDPs by designing more efficient objective functions. We also extend MEA_CDPs’ capability in detecting hierarchical community structures. The improved algorithm is named as iMEA_CDPs. In the experiments, a set of computer-generated networks are first used to test the effect of parameters in iMEA_CDPs, and then four real-world networks are used to validate the performance of iMEA_CDPs. The experimental results show that iMEA_CDPs outperforms MEA_CDPs. Moreover, compared with MEA_CDPs, iMEA_CDPs can detect various kinds of overlapping and hierarchical community structures.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by the Outstanding Young Scholar Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61522311, the General Program of NSFC under Grant 61271301, the Overseas, Hong Kong & Macao Scholars Collaborated Research Program of NSFC under Grant 61528205, the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China under Grant 20130203110010, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant K5051202052.

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  1. Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China

    Chenlong Liu, Jing Liu & Zhongzhou Jiang

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  1. Chenlong Liu
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  2. Jing Liu
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  3. Zhongzhou Jiang
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Correspondence to Jing Liu.

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Liu, C., Liu, J. & Jiang, Z. An improved multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for simultaneously detecting separated and overlapping communities. Nat Comput 15, 635–651 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11047-015-9529-y

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