Community detection model for dynamic networks based on hidden Markov model and evolutionary algorithm

Finding communities of connected individuals in complex networks is challenging, yet crucial for understanding different real-world societies and their interactions. Recently attention has turned to discover the dynamics of such communities. However, detecting accurate community structures that evolve over time adds additional challenges. Almost all the state-of-the-art algorithms are designed based on seemingly the same principle while treating the problem as a coupled optimization model to simultaneously identify community structures and their evolution over time. Unlike all these studies, the current work aims to individually consider this three measures, i.e. intra-community score, inter-community score, and evolution of community over time. Here, we adopt a new perspective towards detecting the evolution of community structures. The proposed method realizes the decomposition of the problem into three essential components; searching in: intra-community connections, inter-community connections, and community evolution. A multi-objective optimization problem is defined to account for the different intra and inter community structures. Further, we formulate the community evolution problem as a Hidden Markov Model in an attempt to dexterously track the most likely sequence of communities. Then the new model, called Hidden Markov Model-based Multi-Objective evolutionary algorithm for Dynamic Community Detection (HMM-MODCD), uses a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm and Viterbi algorithm for formulating objective functions and providing temporal smoothness over time for clustering dynamic networks. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on synthetic and real-world dynamic networks and compared against several state-of-the-art algorithms. The results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to outperform other algorithms.

Automated summary

This study takes a new approach to detect the evolution of community structures by decomposing the problem into three essential components: intra-community connections, inter-community connections, and community evolution. Through a multi-objective optimization algorithm and Viterbi algorithm, the proposed model provides temporal smoothness over time for clustering dynamic networks. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in outperforming other algorithms.