Tracking the random surfer: empirically measured teleportation parameters in PageRank

  • Authors:
  • David F. Gleich;Paul G. Constantine;Abraham D. Flaxman;Asela Gunawardana

  • Affiliations:
  • University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
  • Year:
  • 2010

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

PageRank computes the importance of each node in a directed graph under a random surfer model governed by a teleportation parameter. Commonly denoted alpha, this parameter models the probability of following an edge inside the graph or, when the graph comes from a network of web pages and links, clicking a link on a web page. We empirically measure the teleportation parameter based on browser toolbar logs and a click trail analysis. For a particular user or machine, such analysis produces a value of alpha. We find that these values nicely fit a Beta distribution with mean edge-following probability between 0.3 and 0.7, depending on the site. Using these distributions, we compute PageRank scores where PageRank is computed with respect to a distribution as the teleportation parameter, rather than a constant teleportation parameter. These new metrics are evaluated on the graph of pages in Wikipedia.