Community detection using intelligent water drops optimisation algorithm

Abstract

Community structure means the existence of densely connected subgroups in the networks. It is a surprising property that appears in complex and naturally constructed networks. We are proposing a novel heuristic approach to the community detection problem. In this paper, the community detection problem is solved using the intelligent water drop heuristic on a group of real life networks. The proposed heuristic succeeded in grouping the nodes in the network into sets of densely connected subgroups. Our approach uses the modularity value as an optimisation criterion. The quality of the resulting division in the network was proven using measures like modularity and NMI. The experimental results verify that our algorithm is highly efficient at discovering quality community structure.