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A Deeper Investigation of PageRank as a Function of the Damping Factor

Authors: Paolo Boldi, Massimo Santini, and Sebastiano Vigna

Published in: Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, Volume 7071, Web Information Retrieval and Linear Algebra Algorithms (2007)

Abstract

PageRank is defined as the stationary state of a Markov chain. The chain is obtained by perturbing the transition matrix induced by a web graph with a damping factor $alpha$ that spreads uniformly part of the rank. The choice of $alpha$ is eminently empirical, and in most cases the original suggestion $alpha=0.85$ by Brin and Page is still used. In this paper, we give a mathematical analysis of PageRank when $alpha$ changes. In particular, we show that, contrarily to popular belief, for real-world graphs values of $alpha$ close to $1$ do not give a more meaningful ranking. Then, we give closed-form formulae for PageRank derivatives of any order, and by proving that the $k$-th iteration of the Power Method gives exactly the PageRank value obtained using a Maclaurin polynomial of degree $k$, we show how to obtain an approximation of the derivatives. Finally, we view PageRank as a linear operator acting on the preference vector and show a tight connection between iterated computation and derivation.

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Paolo Boldi, Massimo Santini, and Sebastiano Vigna. A Deeper Investigation of PageRank as a Function of the Damping Factor. In Web Information Retrieval and Linear Algebra Algorithms. Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, Volume 7071, pp. 1-19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2007)

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@InProceedings{boldi_et_al:DagSemProc.07071.3,
  author =	{Boldi, Paolo and Santini, Massimo and Vigna, Sebastiano},
  title =	{{A Deeper Investigation of PageRank as a Function of the Damping Factor}},
  booktitle =	{Web Information Retrieval and Linear Algebra Algorithms},
  pages =	{1--19},
  series =	{Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings (DagSemProc)},
  ISSN =	{1862-4405},
  year =	{2007},
  volume =	{7071},
  editor =	{Andreas Frommer and Michael W. Mahoney and Daniel B. Szyld},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagSemProc.07071.3},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-10722},
  doi =		{10.4230/DagSemProc.07071.3},
  annote =	{Keywords: PageRank, damping factor, Markov chains}
}

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A Deeper Investigation of PageRank as a Function of the Damping Factor

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