Evolutionary Clustering and Community Detection

This chapter provides a formal definition of the problem of cluster analysisCluster analysis, and the related problem of community detectionCommunity detection in graphs. Building on the mathematical definition of these problems, we motivate the use of evolutionary computation in this setting. We then review previous work on this topic, highlighting key approaches regarding the choice of representation and objective functions, as well as regarding the final process of model selection. Finally, we discuss successful applications of evolutionary clustering and the steps we consider necessary to encourage the uptake of these techniques in mainstream machine learning.