Core-Periphery Analysis

Core/periphery analysis partitions a network into a densely interconnected core of actors and a sparse periphery whose members connect to the core but not to one another. Formalized by Borgatti and Everett, the method fits the observed adjacency matrix to an idealized block pattern — a fully connected core block, an empty periphery block, and core–periphery blocks of intermediate density — to test whether and how strongly a network exhibits this canonical mesoscale structure.