A Novel Local Community Detection Method Using Evolutionary Computation

The local community detection is a significant branch of the community detection problems. It aims at finding the local community to which a given starting node belongs. The local community detection plays an important role in analyzing the complex networks and recently has drawn much attention from the researchers. In the past few years, several local community detection algorithms have been proposed. However, the previous methods only make use of the limited local information of networks but overlook the other valuable information. In this article, we propose an evolutionary computation-based algorithm called evolutionary-based local community detection (ELCD) algorithm to detect local communities in the complex networks by taking advantages of the entire obtained information. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on both synthetic and real-world benchmark networks. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art local community detection methods. Furthermore, we test the proposed algorithm on incomplete real-world networks to show its effectiveness on the networks whose global information cannot be obtained.