AbstractThe k-clique problem is identifying the largest complete subgraph of size k on a network, and it has many applications in Social Network Analysis (SNA), coding theory, geometry, etc. Due to the NP-Complete nature of the problem, the meta-heuristic approaches have raised the interest of the researchers and some algorithms are developed. In this paper, a new algorithm based on the Bat optimization approach is developed for finding the maximum k-clique on a social network to increase the

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... nvergence speed and evaluation criteria such as Precision, Recall, and F1-score. The proposed algorithm is simulated in Matlab® software over Dolphin social network and DIMACS dataset for k = 3, 4, 5. The computational results show that the convergence speed on the former dataset is increased in comparison with the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) approaches. Besides, the evaluation criteria are also modified on the latter dataset and the F1-score is obtained as 100% for k = 5.