Social networks and genetic algorithms to choose committees with independent members

•We propose an approach for the committee selection problem.•We define a novel social network group independence performance function.•We build a social network from an R&D public agency.•We compare results with current committees of an R&D public agency.

Choosing committees with independent members in social networks can be regarded as a group selection problem where independence, as the main selection criterion, can be measured by the social distance between group members. Although there are many solutions for the group selection problem in social networks, such as target set selection or community detection, none of them have proposed an approach to select committee members based on independence as group performance measure. In this work, we propose a novel approach for independent node group selection in social networks. This approach defines an independence group function and a genetic algorithm in order to optimize it. We present a case study where we build a real social network with on-line available data extracted from a Research and Development (R&D) public agency, and then we compare selected groups with existing committees of the same agency. Results show that the proposed approach can generate committees that improve group independence compared with existing committees.