Multi-agent memetic algorithm and its application to community structure detection in complex networks

Abstract

A complex system is a system that has many components that are interdependent and appear as a whole and exhibit organized behavior. Community structure detection is an optimization problem in complex networks that involves searching for communities belonging to a network that shares nodes of a similar community with standard features. In this paper, we use a multi-agent memetic algorithm to detect the structure of the community in complex networks by optimizing the amount of modularity and calling it MAMA-Net. In the multi-agent memetic algorithm, agents are placed in a network-like environment to detect the community. Local search is used to find solution space. Having a local search in the memetic algorithm allows each member of the population to increase its evaluation function based on the suitability of its neighbors and achieve the desired result in minimum time. We compare the performance of MAMA-Net in detecting community structure with some standard algorithms. Both real-world and synthetic benchmark networks are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that MAMA-Net could detect communities more accurately than other comparable algorithms.

Keywords

• complex systems
• multi-agent systems
• memetic algorithm
• community detection