Statistical Methods in Finance 2025

Identifying Core-Periphery Structure in Networks via Artificial Ants

By: Imran Ansari
Indian Institute of Science

The core-periphery structure represents a mesoscale structure in networks characterized by a dense interconnection of core nodes and sparse connections among peripheral nodes. This paper introduces an innovative approach for detecting core-periphery structures, leveraging Artificial Ants. The core-periphery structures play a crucial role in elucidat- ing network organization across various domains. The proposed approach, inspired by the foraging behavior of ants, employs artificial pheromone trails to iteratively construct and refine solutions, thereby eliminating the need for arbitrary partitions that often constrain traditional methods. Our method is applied to diverse real-world networks including historical, literary, linguistic, sports and animal social networks, highlighting its adaptability and robustness. We systematically compare the performance of our ap- proach against established core-periphery detection techniques, emphasizing differences in node classification between the core and periphery. Experimental results show that our method achieves superior flexibility and precision, offering marked improvements in the accuracy of core-periphery structure detection.