A High-Performance Evolutionary Multiobjective Community Detection Algorithm

TL;DR

The paper introduces HP-MOCD, a high-performance multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for community detection in large networks, achieving scalability, efficiency, and high-quality results with Pareto optimal solutions.

Contribution

It presents HP-MOCD, the first scalable, parallelized MOEA for large-scale community detection, with topology-aware operators and an open-source Python library.

Findings

Processes networks with over 1 million nodes efficiently.

Outperforms other MOEAs by over 531 times in runtime.

Capable of analyzing large real-world networks within reasonable time.

Abstract

Community detection in complex networks is fundamental across social, biological, and technological domains. While traditional single-objective methods like Louvain and Leiden are computationally efficient, they suffer from resolution bias and structural degeneracy. Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) address these limitations by simultaneously optimizing conflicting structural criteria, however, their high computational costs have historically limited their application to small networks. We present HP-MOCD, a High-Performance Evolutionary Multiobjective Community Detection Algorithm built on Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II), which overcomes these barriers through topology-aware genetic operators, full parallelization, and bit-level optimizations, achieving theoretical O(GN_p|V|) complexity. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world networks. Results demonstrate strong scalability, with HP-MOCD processing networks of over 1,000,000 nodes while maintaining high quality across varying noise levels. It outperforms other MOEAs by more than 531 times in runtime on synthetic datasets, achieving runtimes as low as 57 seconds for graphs with 40,000 nodes on moderately powered hardware. Across 14 real-world networks, HP-MOCD was the only MOEA capable of processing the six largest datasets within a reasonable time, with results competitive with single-objective approaches. Unlike single-solution methods, HP-MOCD produces a Pareto Front, enabling individual-specific trade-offs and providing decision-makers with a spectrum of high-quality community structures. It introduces the first open-source Python MOEA library compatible with networkx and igraph for large-scale community detection.