Block models and personalized PageRank

Abstract

Methods based on PageRank have been fundamental to work on identifying communities in networks, but, to date, there has been little formal basis for the effectiveness of these methods. We establish a surprising connection between the personalized PageRank algorithm and the stochastic block model for random graphs, showing that personalized PageRank, in fact, provides the optimal geometric discriminant function for separating the communities in stochastic block models over a wide class of functions. Building on this result, we develop stronger classifiers that, although scalable, are competitive with computationally much more demanding methods such as belief propagation.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Dec 20, 2016
Source ID
10.1073/pnas.1611275114

Entities

People

  • Isabel M. Kloumann
  • Johan Ugander
  • Jon Kleinberg

Organizations

  • Army Research Office
  • Cornell University
  • Google
  • Meta
  • Simons Foundation
  • Stanford University

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Hydraulic Engineering.
  • Regression Analysis.