204 research outputs found
Random Surfing Without Teleportation
In the standard Random Surfer Model, the teleportation matrix is necessary to
ensure that the final PageRank vector is well-defined. The introduction of this
matrix, however, results in serious problems and imposes fundamental
limitations to the quality of the ranking vectors. In this work, building on
the recently proposed NCDawareRank framework, we exploit the decomposition of
the underlying space into blocks, and we derive easy to check necessary and
sufficient conditions for random surfing without teleportation.Comment: 13 pages. Published in the Volume: "Algorithms, Probability, Networks
and Games, Springer-Verlag, 2015". (The updated version corrects small
typos/errors
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
Shuffling a Stacked Deck: The Case for Partially Randomized Ranking of Search Engine Results
In-degree, PageRank, number of visits and other measures of Web page
popularity significantly influence the ranking of search results by modern
search engines. The assumption is that popularity is closely correlated with
quality, a more elusive concept that is difficult to measure directly.
Unfortunately, the correlation between popularity and quality is very weak for
newly-created pages that have yet to receive many visits and/or in-links.
Worse, since discovery of new content is largely done by querying search
engines, and because users usually focus their attention on the top few
results, newly-created but high-quality pages are effectively ``shut out,'' and
it can take a very long time before they become popular.
We propose a simple and elegant solution to this problem: the introduction of
a controlled amount of randomness into search result ranking methods. Doing so
offers new pages a chance to prove their worth, although clearly using too much
randomness will degrade result quality and annul any benefits achieved. Hence
there is a tradeoff between exploration to estimate the quality of new pages
and exploitation of pages already known to be of high quality. We study this
tradeoff both analytically and via simulation, in the context of an economic
objective function based on aggregate result quality amortized over time. We
show that a modest amount of randomness leads to improved search results
HypTrails: A Bayesian Approach for Comparing Hypotheses About Human Trails on the Web
When users interact with the Web today, they leave sequential digital trails
on a massive scale. Examples of such human trails include Web navigation,
sequences of online restaurant reviews, or online music play lists.
Understanding the factors that drive the production of these trails can be
useful for e.g., improving underlying network structures, predicting user
clicks or enhancing recommendations. In this work, we present a general
approach called HypTrails for comparing a set of hypotheses about human trails
on the Web, where hypotheses represent beliefs about transitions between
states. Our approach utilizes Markov chain models with Bayesian inference. The
main idea is to incorporate hypotheses as informative Dirichlet priors and to
leverage the sensitivity of Bayes factors on the prior for comparing hypotheses
with each other. For eliciting Dirichlet priors from hypotheses, we present an
adaption of the so-called (trial) roulette method. We demonstrate the general
mechanics and applicability of HypTrails by performing experiments with (i)
synthetic trails for which we control the mechanisms that have produced them
and (ii) empirical trails stemming from different domains including website
navigation, business reviews and online music played. Our work expands the
repertoire of methods available for studying human trails on the Web.Comment: Published in the proceedings of WWW'1
PageRank Optimization by Edge Selection
The importance of a node in a directed graph can be measured by its PageRank.
The PageRank of a node is used in a number of application contexts - including
ranking websites - and can be interpreted as the average portion of time spent
at the node by an infinite random walk. We consider the problem of maximizing
the PageRank of a node by selecting some of the edges from a set of edges that
are under our control. By applying results from Markov decision theory, we show
that an optimal solution to this problem can be found in polynomial time. Our
core solution results in a linear programming formulation, but we also provide
an alternative greedy algorithm, a variant of policy iteration, which runs in
polynomial time, as well. Finally, we show that, under the slight modification
for which we are given mutually exclusive pairs of edges, the problem of
PageRank optimization becomes NP-hard.Comment: 30 pages, 3 figure
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