Clustering social networks using nature-inspired BAT algorithm

The widespread extent of internet availability at low cost impels user activities on social media. As a result, a huge number of networks with a lot of varieties are easily accessible. Community detection is one of the significant tasks to understand the behavior and functionality of such real-world networks. Mathematically, community detection problem has been modeled as an optimization problem and various meta-heuristic approaches have been applied to solve the same. Progressively, many new nature-inspired algorithms have also been explored to handle the diverse optimization problems in the last decade. In this paper, nature-inspired Bat Algorithm (BA) is adopted and a new variant of Discrete Bat algorithm (NVDBA) is recommended to identify the communities from social networks. The recommended scheme does not require the number of communities as a prerequisite. The experiments on a number of real-world networks have been performed to assess the performance of the proposed approach which in turn confirms its validity. The results confirm that the recommended algorithm is competitive with other existing methods and offers promising results for identifying communities in social networks. © 2020 Science and Information Organization.