"Density-based and Transport-based Core-Periphery Structures in Networks"

One of my papers came out in final form today. Here is the key information about it.


Title: Density-based and Transport-based Core-Periphery Structures in Networks

Authors: Sang Hoon Lee, Mihai Cucuringu, and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: Networks often possess mesoscale structures, and studying them can yield insights into both structure and function. It is most common to study community structure, but numerous other types of mesoscale structures also exist. In this paper, we examine core-periphery structures based on both density and transport. In such structures, core network components are well-connected both among themselves and to peripheral components, which are not well-connected to anything. We examine core-periphery structures in a wide range of examples of transportation, social, and financial networks—including road networks in large urban areas, a rabbit warren, a dolphin social network, a European interbank network, and a migration network between counties in the United States. We illustrate that a recently developed transport-based notion of node coreness is very useful for characterizing transportation networks. We also generalize this notion to examine core versus peripheral edges, and we show that the resulting diagnostic is also useful for transportation networks. To examine the properties of transportation networks further, we develop a family of generative models of roadlike networks. We illustrate the effect of the dimensionality of the embedding space on transportation networks, and we demonstrate that the correlations between different measures of coreness can be very different for different types of networks.


P.S. Check out the rabbit-warren network!

"Core-Periphery Structure in Networks"

Our theory paper on core-periphery structure in networks, which we first posted on the arXiv in February 2012, is finally out in its official published form. Here are the details about the paper, which poses the problem of algorithmic detection of core-periphery structure in a particularly nice way.


Title: Core-Periphery Structure in Networks

Authors: M. Puck Rombach, Mason A. Porter, James H. Fowler, and Peter J. Mucha

Abstract: Intermediate-scale (or "meso-scale") structures in networks have received considerable attention, as the algorithmic detection of such structures makes it possible to discover network features that are not apparent either at the local scale of nodes and edges or at the global scale of summary statistics. Numerous types of meso-scale structures can occur in networks, but investigations of such features have focused predominantly on the identification and study of community structure. In this paper, we develop a new method to investigate the meso-scale feature known as core-periphery structure, which entails identifying densely connected core nodes and sparsely connected peripheral nodes. In contrast to communities, the nodes in a core are also reasonably well connected to those in a network’s periphery. Our new method of computing core-periphery structure can identify multiple cores in a network and takes into account different possible core structures. We illustrate the differences between our method and several existing methods for identifying which nodes belong to a core, and we use our technique to examine core-periphery structure in examples of friendship, collaboration, transportation, and voting networks.