Title: TPA: Fast, Scalable, and Accurate Method for Approximate Random Walk with Restart on Billion Scale Graphs,
Abstract: 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 computing approximate RWR on
large graphs. TPA exploits two important properties in RWR: 1) nodes close to a
seed node are likely to be revisited in following steps due to block-wise
structure of many real-world graphs, and 2) RWR scores of nodes which reside
far from the seed node are proportional to their PageRank scores. Based on
these two properties, TPA divides approximate RWR problem into two subproblems
called neighbor approximation and stranger approximation. In the neighbor
approximation, TPA estimates RWR scores of nodes close to the seed based on
scores of few early steps from the seed. In the stranger approximation, TPA
estimates RWR scores for nodes far from the seed using their PageRank. The
stranger and neighbor approximations are conducted in the preprocessing phase
and the online phase, respectively. Through extensive experiments, we show that
TPA requires up to 3.5x less time with up to 40x less memory space than other
state-of-the-art methods for the preprocessing phase. In the online phase, TPA
computes approximate RWR up to 30x faster than existing methods while
maintaining high accuracy.