Date of Award
9-26-2018
Publication Type
Master Thesis
Degree Name
M.Sc.
Department
Computer Science
Keywords
Evolutionary Computation, Evolutionary Algorithms, Genetic and Cultural algorithms, Hybrid Genetic and Cultural Algorithms, SCAN, WSCAN and WSCAN-TFP, Schema Theorem, Team Formation Problem in social networks, Social Network Analysis
Supervisor
Kobti, Ziad
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Social Network Analysis helps to visualize and understand the roles and relationships that ease or impede the collaboration and sharing of the information and knowledge in an organization. In this research work, we will focus on the Team Formation Problem (TFP) which is an open problem where we need to identify an ideal team, with members of complementary talent or skills, to solve any given task. Current research suggests that TFP solutions have been attempted with evolutionary computation approach using Cultural Algorithms (CA) and Genetic Algorithms (GA). However, SCAN (Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks) variants such as WSCAN (Weighted Structural Clustering Algorithm for Networks) demonstrate a high capability to find solutions for another type of network problems. In this thesis, we first propose to use WSCAN-TFP algorithm to deal with the problem of team formation in social networks, and we our findings indicate that WSCAN-TFP algorithm worked faster than the evolutionary algorithms counterparts but was of lower performance compared to CAs and GAs. Next, we propose two hybrid solutions by combining GA and CA with a modified WSCAN-TFP algorithm. To test the performance of our proposed approaches, we define multiple quality criteria based on communication cost (CC), average fitness score (AFS) and average processing time. We used big datasets from DBLP nodes network with sizes 50K and 100K. The results show that our proposed methods HGA and HCA can find the near-optimal solutions faster with minimum communication cost with the improvement of $\approx 66\%$ and $\approx 57\%$ in average fitness in comparison to existing GA and CA methods respectively.
Recommended Citation
Bhullar, Amangel, "Improving Quality of the Solution for the Team Formation Problem in Social Networks Using SCAN Variant and Evolutionary Computation" (2018). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 7497.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/7497