2,152 research outputs found
Investigating the Impact of the Blogsphere: Using PageRank to Determine the Distribution of Attention
Much has been written in recent years about the blogosphere and its impact on political, educational and scientific debates. Lately the issue has received significant attention from the industry. As the blogosphere continues to grow, even doubling its size every six months, this paper investigates its apparent impact on the overall Web itself. We use the popular Google PageRank algorithm which employs a model of Web used to measure the distribution of user attention across sites in the blogosphere. The paper is based on an analysis of the PageRank distribution for 8.8 million blogs in 2005 and 2006. This paper addresses the following key questions: How is PageRank distributed across the blogosphere? Does it indicate the existence of measurable, visible effects of blogs on the overall mediasphere? Can we compare the distribution of attention to blogs as characterised by the PageRank with the situation for other forms of Web content? Has there been a growth in the impact of the blogosphere on the Web over the two years analysed here? Finally, it will also be necessary to examine the limitations of a PageRank-centred approach
A Weighted Correlation Index for Rankings with Ties
Understanding the correlation between two different scores for the same set
of items is a common problem in information retrieval, and the most commonly
used statistics that quantifies this correlation is Kendall's . However,
the standard definition fails to capture that discordances between items with
high rank are more important than those between items with low rank. Recently,
a new measure of correlation based on average precision has been proposed to
solve this problem, but like many alternative proposals in the literature it
assumes that there are no ties in the scores. This is a major deficiency in a
number of contexts, and in particular while comparing centrality scores on
large graphs, as the obvious baseline, indegree, has a very large number of
ties in web and social graphs. We propose to extend Kendall's definition in a
natural way to take into account weights in the presence of ties. We prove a
number of interesting mathematical properties of our generalization and
describe an algorithm for its computation. We also validate the
usefulness of our weighted measure of correlation using experimental data
Bidirectional PageRank Estimation: From Average-Case to Worst-Case
We present a new algorithm for estimating the Personalized PageRank (PPR)
between a source and target node on undirected graphs, with sublinear
running-time guarantees over the worst-case choice of source and target nodes.
Our work builds on a recent line of work on bidirectional estimators for PPR,
which obtained sublinear running-time guarantees but in an average-case sense,
for a uniformly random choice of target node. Crucially, we show how the
reversibility of random walks on undirected networks can be exploited to
convert average-case to worst-case guarantees. While past bidirectional methods
combine forward random walks with reverse local pushes, our algorithm combines
forward local pushes with reverse random walks. We also discuss how to modify
our methods to estimate random-walk probabilities for any length distribution,
thereby obtaining fast algorithms for estimating general graph diffusions,
including the heat kernel, on undirected networks.Comment: Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web-Graph (WAW) 201
Agents, Bookmarks and Clicks: A topical model of Web traffic
Analysis of aggregate and individual Web traffic has shown that PageRank is a
poor model of how people navigate the Web. Using the empirical traffic patterns
generated by a thousand users, we characterize several properties of Web
traffic that cannot be reproduced by Markovian models. We examine both
aggregate statistics capturing collective behavior, such as page and link
traffic, and individual statistics, such as entropy and session size. No model
currently explains all of these empirical observations simultaneously. We show
that all of these traffic patterns can be explained by an agent-based model
that takes into account several realistic browsing behaviors. First, agents
maintain individual lists of bookmarks (a non-Markovian memory mechanism) that
are used as teleportation targets. Second, agents can retreat along visited
links, a branching mechanism that also allows us to reproduce behaviors such as
the use of a back button and tabbed browsing. Finally, agents are sustained by
visiting novel pages of topical interest, with adjacent pages being more
topically related to each other than distant ones. This modulates the
probability that an agent continues to browse or starts a new session, allowing
us to recreate heterogeneous session lengths. The resulting model is capable of
reproducing the collective and individual behaviors we observe in the empirical
data, reconciling the narrowly focused browsing patterns of individual users
with the extreme heterogeneity of aggregate traffic measurements. This result
allows us to identify a few salient features that are necessary and sufficient
to interpret the browsing patterns observed in our data. In addition to the
descriptive and explanatory power of such a model, our results may lead the way
to more sophisticated, realistic, and effective ranking and crawling
algorithms.Comment: 10 pages, 16 figures, 1 table - Long version of paper to appear in
Proceedings of the 21th ACM conference on Hypertext and Hypermedi
Ergodic Control and Polyhedral approaches to PageRank Optimization
We study a general class of PageRank optimization problems which consist in
finding an optimal outlink strategy for a web site subject to design
constraints. We consider both a continuous problem, in which one can choose the
intensity of a link, and a discrete one, in which in each page, there are
obligatory links, facultative links and forbidden links. We show that the
continuous problem, as well as its discrete variant when there are no
constraints coupling different pages, can both be modeled by constrained Markov
decision processes with ergodic reward, in which the webmaster determines the
transition probabilities of websurfers. Although the number of actions turns
out to be exponential, we show that an associated polytope of transition
measures has a concise representation, from which we deduce that the continuous
problem is solvable in polynomial time, and that the same is true for the
discrete problem when there are no coupling constraints. We also provide
efficient algorithms, adapted to very large networks. Then, we investigate the
qualitative features of optimal outlink strategies, and identify in particular
assumptions under which there exists a "master" page to which all controlled
pages should point. We report numerical results on fragments of the real web
graph.Comment: 39 page
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