An ant colony optimization method to detect communities in social networks

Saeed H.S. Javadi, Shahram Khadivi, M. Ebrahim Shiri, Jia Xu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Community detection is an important task in social network analysis. It aims to partition the network into clusters so that interactions among members within a cluster are considerably more frequent than that across clusters. A typical instantiation is to maximize the modularity of clusters which is a NP-hard problem, and thus, heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms are employed as approximation. We present a novel divisive algorithm based on ant colony optimization to detect hierarchical community structure by maximizing the modularity. Our algorithm splits the network into two local communities iteratively and incorporates both heuristic information and pheromone trails. Experimental results on a set of synthetic benchmarks and real-world networks verified that our algorithm is highly effective for hierarchical community structure detection.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationASONAM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
EditorsMartin Ester, Guandong Xu, Xindong Wu
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages200-203
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781479958771
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 10 2014
Event2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2014 - Beijing, China
Duration: Aug 17 2014Aug 20 2014

Publication series

NameASONAM 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining

Conference

Conference2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2014
Country/TerritoryChina
CityBeijing
Period8/17/148/20/14

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications

Keywords

  • Ant Colony Optimization
  • Community Detection
  • Network Clustering
  • Social Network Analysis

Cite this