Methods for ranking the importance of nodes in a network have a rich history in machine learning and across domains that analyze structured data. Recent work has evaluated these methods though the seed set expansion problem: given a subset $S$ of nodes from a community of interest in an underlying graph, can we reliably identify the rest of the community? We start from the observation that the most widely used techniques for this problem, personalized PageRank and heat kernel methods, operate in the space of landing probabilities of a random walk rooted at the seed set, ranking nodes according to weighted sums of landing probabilities of different length walks. Both schemes, however, lack an a priori relationship to the seed set objective. In this work we develop a principled framework for evaluating ranking methods by studying seed set expansion applied to the stochastic block model. We derive the optimal gradient for separating the landing probabilities of two classes in a stochastic block model, and find, surprisingly, that under reasonable assumptions the gradient is asymptotically equivalent to personalized PageRank for a specific choice of the PageRank parameter $α$ that depends on the block model parameters. This connection provides a novel formal motivation for the success of personalized PageRank in seed set expansion and node ranking generally. We use this connection to propose more advanced techniques incorporating higher moments of landing probabilities; our advanced methods exhibit greatly improved performance despite being simple linear classification rules, and are even competitive with belief propagation.
In this paper new results on personalized PageRank are shown. We consider directed graphs that may contain dangling nodes. The main result presented gives an analytical characterization of all the possible values of the personalized PageRank for any node.We use this result to give a theoretical justification of a recent model that uses the personalized PageRank to classify users of Social Networks Sites. We introduce new concepts concerning competitivity and leadership in complex networks. We also present some theoretical techniques to locate leaders and competitors which are valid for any per…
We analyse a mean-field model of Personalized PageRank on the Erdos-Renyi random graph containing a denser planted Erdos-Renyi subgraph. We investigate the regimes where the values of Personalized PageRank concentrate around the mean-field value. We also study the optimization of the damping factor, the only parameter in Personalized PageRank. Our theoretical results help to understand the applicability of Personalized PageRank and its limitations for local graph clustering.
The personalized PageRank algorithm is one of the most versatile tools for the analysis of networks. In spite of its ubiquity, maintaining personalized PageRank vectors when the underlying network constantly evolves is still a challenging task. To address this limitation, this work proposes a novel distributed algorithm to locally update personalized PageRank vectors when the graph topology changes. The proposed algorithm is based on the use of Chebyshev polynomials and a novel update equation that encompasses a large family of PageRank-based methods. In particular, the algorithm has the follo…
Personalalized PageRank uses random walks to determine the importance or authority of nodes in a graph from the point of view of a given source node. Much past work has considered how to compute personalized PageRank from a given source node to other nodes. In this work we consider the problem of computing personalized PageRanks to a given target node from all source nodes. This problem can be interpreted as finding who supports the target or who is interested in the target. We present an efficient algorithm for computing personalized PageRank to a given target up to any given accuracy. We giv…
The short-time Fourier transform (STFT) is widely used to analyze the spectra of temporal signals that vary through time. Signals defined over graphs, due to their intrinsic complexity, exhibit large variations in their patterns. In this work we propose a new formulation for an STFT for signals defined over graphs. This formulation draws on recent ideas from spectral graph theory, using personalized PageRank vectors as its fundamental building block. Furthermore, this work establishes and explores the connection between local spectral graph theory and localized spectral analysis of graph signa…
We present new algorithms for Personalized PageRank estimation and Personalized PageRank search. First, for the problem of estimating Personalized PageRank (PPR) from a source distribution to a target node, we present a new bidirectional estimator with simple yet strong guarantees on correctness and performance, and 3x to 8x speedup over existing estimators in experiments on a diverse set of networks. Moreover, it has a clean algebraic structure which enables it to be used as a primitive for the Personalized PageRank Search problem: Given a network like Facebook, a query like "people named Joh…
Given its wide-ranging and long-lasting impacts, COVID-19, especially its spatial spreading dynamics has received much attention. Knowledge of such dynamics helps public health professionals and city managers devise and deploy efficient contact-tracing and treatment measures. However, most existing studies focus on aggregate mobility flows and have rarely exploited the widely available disaggregate-level human mobility data. In this paper, we propose a Personalized PageRank (PPR) method to estimate COVID-19 transmission risks based on a bipartite network of people and locations. The method inc…
We propose a new algorithm, FAST-PPR, for estimating personalized PageRank: given start node $s$ and target node $t$ in a directed graph, and given a threshold $δ$, FAST-PPR estimates the Personalized PageRank $π_s(t)$ from $s$ to $t$, guaranteeing a small relative error as long $π_s(t)>δ$. Existing algorithms for this problem have a running-time of $Ω(1/δ)$; in comparison, FAST-PPR has a provable average running-time guarantee of ${O}(\sqrt{d/δ})$ (where $d$ is the average in-degree of the graph). This is a significant improvement, since $δ$ is often $O(1/n)$ (where $n$ is the number of nodes…
The University of Western Ontario（西安大略大学）；Reykjavik University（雷克雅未克大学）
In this paper we present a novel algorithm to study the evolution of credit risk across complex multilayer networks. Pagerank-like algorithms allow for the propagation of an influence variable across single networks, and allow quantifying the risk single entities (nodes) are subject to given the connection they have to other nodes in the network. Multilayer networks, on the other hand, are networks where subset of nodes can be associated to a unique set (layer), and where edges connect elements either intra or inter networks. Our personalized PageRank algorithm for multilayer networks allows f…
Growing popularity of social networks demands a highly efficient Personalized PageRank (PPR) updating due to the fast-evolving web graphs of enormous size. While current researches are focusing on PPR updating under link structure modification, efficiently updating PPR when node insertion/ deletion involved remains a challenge. In the previous work called Virtual Web (VW), a few VW architectures are designed, which results in some highly effective initializations to significantly accelerate PageRank updating under both link modification and page insertion/deletion. In the paper, under the gene…
Decentralization is emerging as a key feature of the future Internet. However, effective algorithms for search are missing from state-of-the-art decentralized technologies, such as distributed hash tables and blockchain. This is surprising, since decentralized search has been studied extensively in earlier peer-to-peer (P2P) literature. In this work, we adopt a fresh outlook for decentralized search in P2P networks that is inspired by advancements in dense information retrieval and graph signal processing. In particular, we generate latent representations of P2P nodes based on their stored doc…
We present new, more efficient algorithms for estimating random walk scores such as Personalized PageRank from a given source node to one or several target nodes. These scores are useful for personalized search and recommendations on networks including social networks, user-item networks, and the web. Past work has proposed using Monte Carlo or using linear algebra to estimate scores from a single source to every target, making them inefficient for a single pair. Our contribution is a new bidirectional algorithm which combines linear algebra and Monte Carlo to achieve significant speed improve…
Personalized PageRank (PPR) is a measure of the importance of a node from the perspective of another (we call these nodes the $\textit{target}$ and the $\textit{source}$, respectively). PPR has been used in many applications, such as offering a Twitter user (the source) recommendations of who to follow (targets deemed important by PPR); additionally, PPR has been used in graph-theoretic problems such as community detection. However, computing PPR is infeasible for large networks like Twitter, so efficient estimation algorithms are necessary. In this work, we analyze the relationship between PP…
The paper provides statistical theory and intuition for personalized PageRank (called "PPR"): a popular technique that samples a small community from a massive network. We study a setting where the entire network is expensive to obtain thoroughly or to maintain, but we can start from a seed node of interest and "crawl" the network to find other nodes through their connections. By crawling the graph in a designed way, the PPR vector can be approximated without querying the entire massive graph, making it an alternative to snowball sampling. Using the degree-corrected stochastic block model, we …
Personalized PageRank (PPR) has enormous applications, such as link prediction and recommendation systems for social networks, which often require the fully PPR to be known. Besides, most of real-life graphs are edge-weighted, e.g., the interaction between users on the Facebook network. However, it is computationally difficult to compute the fully PPR, especially on large graphs, not to mention that most existing approaches do not consider the weights of edges. In particular, the existing approach cannot handle graphs with billion edges on a moderate-size cluster. To address this problem, this…
In a former paper we simplified the proof of a theorem on personalized random walk that is fundamental to graph nodes clustering and generalized it to bipartite graphs for a specific case where the proobability of random jump was proprtional to the number of links of "personally prefereed" nodes. In this paper we turn to the more complex issue of graphs in which the random jump follows uniform distribution.
Many systems, including the Internet, social networks, and the power grid, can be represented as graphs. When analyzing graphs, it is often useful to compute scores describing the relative importance or distance between nodes. One example is Personalized PageRank (PPR), which assigns to each node $v$ a vector whose $i$-th entry describes the importance of the $i$-th node from the perspective of $v$. PPR has proven useful in many applications, such as recommending who users should follow on social networks (if this $i$-th entry is large, $v$ may be interested in following the $i$-th user). Unfo…
Given a graph $G$, a source node $s$ and a target node $t$, the personalized PageRank (PPR) of $t$ with respect to $s$ is the probability that a random walk starting from $s$ terminates at $t$. An important variant of the PPR query is single-source PPR (SSPPR), which enumerates all nodes in $G$, and returns the top-$k$ nodes with the highest PPR values with respect to a given source $s$. PPR in general and SSPPR in particular have important applications in web search and social networks, e.g., in Twitter's Who-To-Follow recommendation service. However, PPR computation is known to be expensive …
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
Given an input graph G and a node v in G, homogeneous network embedding (HNE) maps the graph structure in the vicinity of v to a compact, fixed-dimensional feature vector. This paper focuses on HNE for massive graphs, e.g., with billions of edges. On this scale, most existing approaches fail, as they incur either prohibitively high costs, or severely compromised result utility. Our proposed solution, called Node-Reweighted PageRank (NRP), is based on a classic idea of deriving embedding vectors from pairwise personalized PageRank (PPR) values. Our contributions are twofold: first, we design a …
Tigerlily is a TigerGraph based system designed to solve the drug interaction prediction task. In this machine learning task, we want to predict whether two drugs have an adverse interaction. Our framework allows us to solve this highly relevant real-world problem using graph mining techniques in these steps: (a) Using PyTigergraph we create a heterogeneous biological graph of drugs and proteins. (b) We calculate the personalized PageRank scores of drug nodes in the TigerGraph Cloud. (c) We embed the nodes using sparse non-negative matrix factorization of the personalized PageRank matrix. (d) …
RIKEN AIP（日本理化学研究所革新智能综合研究中心）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）
A hypergraph is a useful combinatorial object to model ternary or higher-order relations among entities. Clustering hypergraphs is a fundamental task in network analysis. In this study, we develop two clustering algorithms based on personalized PageRank on hypergraphs. The first one is local in the sense that its goal is to find a tightly connected vertex set with a bounded volume including a specified vertex. The second one is global in the sense that its goal is to find a tightly connected vertex set. For both algorithms, we discuss theoretical guarantees on the conductance of the output ver…
Graph visualization is a vital component in many real-world applications (e.g., social network analysis, web mining, and bioinformatics) that enables users to unearth crucial insights from complex data. Lying in the core of graph visualization is the node distance measure, which determines how the nodes are placed on the screen. A favorable node distance measure should be informative in reflecting the full structural information between nodes and effective in optimizing visual aesthetics. However, existing node distance measures yield sub-par visualization quality as they fall short of these r…
Partially-observed network data collected by link-tracing based sampling methods is often being studied to obtain the characteristics of a large complex network. However, little attention has been paid to sampling from directed networks such as WWW and Peer-to-Peer networks. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step (sampling/estimation) framework to measure nodal characteristics which can be defined by an average target function in an arbitrary directed network. To this end, we propose a personalized PageRank-based algorithm to visit and sample nodes. This algorithm only uses already visited…
Community detection is, at its core, an attempt to attach an interpretable function to an otherwise indecipherable form. The importance of labeling communities has obvious implications for identifying clusters in social networks, but it has a number of equally relevant applications in product recommendations, biological systems, and many forms of classification. The local variety of community detection starts with a small set of labeled seed nodes, and aims to estimate the community containing these nodes. One of the most ubiquitous methods - due to its simplicity and efficiency - is personali…
A fundamental problem arising in many applications in Web science and social network analysis is, given an arbitrary approximation factor $c>1$, to output a set $S$ of nodes that with high probability contains all nodes of PageRank at least $Δ$, and no node of PageRank smaller than $Δ/c$. We call this problem {\sc SignificantPageRanks}. We develop a nearly optimal, local algorithm for the problem with runtime complexity $\tilde{O}(n/Δ)$ on networks with $n$ nodes. We show that any algorithm for solving this problem must have runtime of $Ω(n/Δ)$, rendering our algorithm optimal up to logarithmi…
Landing probabilities (LP) of random walks (RW) over graphs encode rich information regarding graph topology. Generalized PageRanks (GPR), which represent weighted sums of LPs of RWs, utilize the discriminative power of LP features to enable many graph-based learning studies. Previous work in the area has mostly focused on evaluating suitable weights for GPRs, and only a few studies so far have attempted to derive the optimal weights of GRPs for a given application. We take a fundamental step forward in this direction by using random graph models to better our understanding of the behavior of …
In this paper, we consider the problem of diversity in ranking of the nodes in a graph. The task is to pick the top-k nodes in the graph which are both 'central' and 'diverse'. Many graph-based models of NLP like text summarization, opinion summarization involve the concept of diversity in generating the summaries. We develop a novel method which works in an iterative fashion based on random walks to achieve diversity. Specifically, we use negative reinforcement as a main tool to introduce diversity in the Personalized PageRank framework. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our alg…
Local community detection consists of finding a group of nodes closely related to the seeds, a small set of nodes of interest. Such group of nodes are densely connected or have a high probability of being connected internally than their connections to other clusters in the network. Existing local community detection methods focus on finding either one local community that all seeds are most likely to be in or finding a single community for each of the seeds. However, a seed member usually belongs to multiple local overlapping communities. In this work, we present a novel method of detecting mu…
Community detection is an important task in network analysis. A community (also referred to as a cluster) is a set of cohesive vertices that have more connections inside the set than outside. In many social and information networks, these communities naturally overlap. For instance, in a social network, each vertex in a graph corresponds to an individual who usually participates in multiple communities. In this paper, we propose an efficient overlapping community detection algorithm using a seed expansion approach. The key idea of our algorithm is to find good seeds, and then greedily expand t…
Given a large graph, how can we determine similarity between nodes in a fast and accurate way? Random walk with restart (RWR) is a popular measure for this purpose and has been exploited in numerous data mining applications including ranking, anomaly detection, link prediction, and community detection. However, previous methods for computing exact RWR require prohibitive storage sizes and computational costs, and alternative methods which avoid such costs by computing approximate RWR have limited accuracy. In this paper, we propose TPA, a fast, scalable, and highly accurate method for computin…
