Perhaps Bugs Bunny would not have taken a wrong turn at
Albuquerque if he'd only known some more network analysis? In a paper published in Physical Review E, Postdoctoral Researcher Sang Hoon Lee,
Associate Professor Mason Porter, and their collaborator Mihai Cucuringu from
UCLA reported the results of their network analysis of a rabbit warren in a paper on core-periphery structure. Using measures of high-traffic and low-traffic
areas in networks, including novel notions of "core" and
"peripheral" junctions and pathways, they were able to characterise
the rabbit social and breeding areas in a simple way. One of the main points of the paper is that
one can measure coreness based not only on notions of network density (which is
the usual way of approaching the problem) but also on notions of transportation
in a network. Lee, Cucuringu, and Porter compared density-based and transportation-based
notions of core-periphery structure using a diverse set of applications: urban
road networks, a European bank network, generative models for road-like
networks, a US migration network, and more.