An Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization Based Fuzzy Method for Overlapping Community Detection

摘要

In the last decade, the detection of overlapping communities has received increasing attention in network science. Among various clustering techniques, the fuzzy clustering has been widely adopted in overlapping community detection, since the soft assignment provided by it naturally meets the overlapping between multiple communities. The crucial step of fuzzy-clustering-based overlapping community detection is to find the optimal community centers, so that the overlapping communities can be obtained according to the membership degrees between nodes and community centers. In this article, we propose an evolutionary multiobjective optimization-based fuzzy method for overlapping community detection. In contrast to traditional fuzzy clustering methods, the proposed method optimizes the community centers by using a specially tailored multiobjective evolutionary algorithm. Moreover, it can also find an appropriate fuzzy threshold for each node, so that diverse overlapping community structures can be uncovered. In the experiments, we compare the proposed method with six state-of-the-art overlapping community detection approaches on synthetic and real-world networks with different scales and characteristics. The statistical results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain the best results on most test instances.