Random Alpha PageRank

Abstract

We suggest a revision to the PageRank random surfer model that considers the influence of a population of random surfers on the PageRank vector. In the revised model, each member of the population has its own teleportation parameter chosen from a probability distribution, and consequently, the ranking vector is random. We propose three algorithms for computing the statistics of the random ranking vector based respectively on (i) random sampling, (ii) paths along the links of the underlying graph, and (iii) quadrature formulas. We find that the expectation of the random ranking vector produces similar rankings to its deterministic analogue, but the standard deviation gives uncorrelated information (under a Kendall-tau metric) with myriad potential uses. We examine applications of this model to web spam.