Partition Clustering in Complex Weighted Networks Using K-Cut Ranking and Krill-Herd Optimization

Network partitioning has been studied extensively on undirected and weighted networks that need to partition the graph into small clusters. Graph-cutting is a widely known approach that removes the inter-cluster edges to find the local network clusters. Cutting a network into small clusters is pivotal in a mixed integer optimization problem. Proper selection of cut sequences discards the possibility of trivial partitions and reduces the computation load to improve cluster quality. Proper cut-sequence selection relies on multiple heuristics that restrict this problem from being generalized. Cut-sequence selection is an NP-hard problem that turns out to be challenging for weighted networks. This paper presents a swarm-heuristics-based framework to solve the cut-sequence selection problem in weighted networks. First, we generate an affinity network from a given data set. A cost-based objective function is formalized that takes cut sequences as input and returns the weighted intra-cluster connected components. Subsequently, heuristics-based cut sequences are initialized, and krill-herd optimization is used to solve the objective function. The framework is empirically tested on simulated and real-world networks. Network-based indices are used to measure the quality of partitions. The comparative analysis, computation time, and convergence analysis are performed with state-of-the-art methods to report the competitive behavior of the framework. The framework is highly effective and has paved new ways for future research to solve the cut-sequence selection problem without prior knowledge.