Preferential centrality with a density penalty: formulation and an open-source implementation
Abstract
Preferential centrality (Hellervik, Nilsson and Andersson, 2019) models spatial activity through feedback between activity and attraction. We extend it with a density penalty. The local response depends on activity per unit of capacity and scales with capacity. A correction that is uniform per unit of capacity preserves total activity, and for a chosen response function and penalty strength, conservation determines this correction. We provide prefcent, an open-source reference implementation with convergence and feasibility checks and records of each run's inputs and settings. It reproduces the 200-iteration outputs of a companion Porto Alegre study across all 65,357 network segments, with median relative differences of order 10−14. In a strong-feedback example, the penalty reduces concentration and reaches the stopping tolerance in fewer iterations. Other synthetic examples show how penalty strength changes the relative prominence of centers and how their number varies with transport costs. A further example reaches different numerical equilibria from different initial states on the same network and capacity landscape. In multi-start sweeps on three synthetic two-dimensional landscapes, distinct converged states occur over a range of parameter values: at 172 of 420 points of a grid in feedback strength and transport cost, including 75 where the states differ in their number of centers. The note provides a model specification and a reproducible computational basis for further theoretical and empirical work.
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BibTeX
@misc{hellervik2026preferential,
title = {{Preferential centrality with a density penalty: formulation and an open-source implementation}},
author = {Alexander Hellervik},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.06118},
eprint = {2610.06118},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06118},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Preferential centrality with a density penalty: formulation and an open-source implementation
AU - Alexander Hellervik
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.06118
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06118
AB - Preferential centrality (Hellervik, Nilsson and Andersson, 2019) models spatial activity through feedback between activity and attraction. We extend it with a density penalty. The local response depends on activity per unit of capacity and scales with capacity. A correction that is uniform per unit of capacity preserves total activity, and for a chosen response function and penalty strength, conservation determines this correction. We provide prefcent, an open-source reference implementation with convergence and feasibility checks and records of each run's inputs and settings. It reproduces the 200-iteration outputs of a companion Porto Alegre study across all 65,357 network segments, with median relative differences of order 10^−14. In a strong-feedback example, the penalty reduces concentration and reaches the stopping tolerance in fewer iterations. Other synthetic examples show how penalty strength changes the relative prominence of centers and how their number varies with transport costs. A further example reaches different numerical equilibria from different initial states on the same network and capacity landscape. In multi-start sweeps on three synthetic two-dimensional landscapes, distinct converged states occur over a range of parameter values: at 172 of 420 points of a grid in feedback strength and transport cost, including 75 where the states differ in their number of centers. The note provides a model specification and a reproducible computational basis for further theoretical and empirical work.
ER -