Community detection in social networks with genetic algorithms

A new genetic algorithm to detect communities in social networks is presented. The algorithm uses a fitness function able to identify groups of nodes in the network having dense intra-connections, and sparse inter-connections. The variation operators employed are suitably adapted to take into account the actual links among the nodes. These modified operators makes the method efficient because the space of possible solutions is sensibly reduced. Experiments on a real life network show the capability of the method to successfully identify the network structure.