Title: Sampling for Approximate Bipartite Network Projection,
Abstract: Bipartite networks manifest as a stream of edges that represent transactions,
e.g., purchases by retail customers. Many machine learning applications employ
neighborhood-based measures to characterize the similarity among the nodes,
such as the pairwise number of common neighbors (CN) and related metrics. While
the number of node pairs that share neighbors is potentially enormous, only a
relatively small proportion of them have many common neighbors. This motivates
finding a weighted sampling approach to preferentially sample these node pairs.
This paper presents a new sampling algorithm that provides a fixed size
unbiased estimate of the similarity matrix resulting from a bipartite graph
stream projection. The algorithm has two components. First, it maintains a
reservoir of sampled bipartite edges with sampling weights that favor selection
of high similarity nodes. Second, arriving edges generate a stream of
\textsl{similarity updates} based on their adjacency with the current sample.
These updates are aggregated in a second reservoir sample-based stream
aggregator to yield the final unbiased estimate. Experiments on real world
graphs show that a 10% sample at each stage yields estimates of high similarity
edges with weighted relative errors of about 1%.