Multiobjective biogeography based optimization algorithm with decomposition for community detection in dynamic networks

• A multiobjective BBO algorithm with decomposition is proposed.
• A novel sorting strategy is presented for comparing quality of habitats.
• Problem specific migration and mutation models are designed to promote effectiveness.
• Our algorithm performs better than other algorithms in the experiments.

Identifying community structures in static network misses the opportunity to capture the evolutionary patterns. So community detection in dynamic network has attracted many researchers. In this paper, a multiobjective biogeography based optimization algorithm with decomposition (MBBOD) is proposed to solve community detection problem in dynamic networks. In the proposed algorithm, the decomposition mechanism is adopted to optimize two evaluation objectives named modularity and normalized mutual information simultaneously, which measure the quality of the community partitions and temporal cost respectively. A novel sorting strategy for multiobjective biogeography based optimization is presented for comparing quality of habitats to get species counts. In addition, problem-specific migration and mutation model are introduced to improve the effectiveness of the new algorithm. Experimental results both on synthetic and real networks demonstrate that our algorithm is effective and promising, and it can detect communities more accurately in dynamic networks compared with DYNMOGA and FaceNet.