  We introduce several novel and computationally efficient methods for
detecting "core--periphery structure" in networks. Core--periphery structure is
a type of mesoscale structure that includes densely-connected core vertices and
sparsely-connected peripheral vertices. Core vertices tend to be well-connected
both among themselves and to peripheral vertices, which tend not to be
well-connected to other vertices. Our first method, which is based on
transportation in networks, aggregates information from many geodesic paths in
a network and yields a score for each vertex that reflects the likelihood that
a vertex is a core vertex. Our second method is based on a low-rank
approximation of a network's adjacency matrix, which can often be expressed as
a tensor-product matrix. Our third approach uses the bottom eigenvector of the
random-walk Laplacian to infer a coreness score and a classification into core
and peripheral vertices. We also design an objective function to (1) help
classify vertices into core or peripheral vertices and (2) provide a
goodness-of-fit criterion for classifications into core versus peripheral
vertices. To examine the performance of our methods, we apply our algorithms to
both synthetically-generated networks and a variety of networks constructed
from real-world data sets.
