Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “PageRank”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

Efficient numerical methods to solve sparse linear equations with application to PageRank

Over the last two decades, the PageRank problem has received increased interest from the academic community as an efficient tool to estimate web-page importance in information retrieval. Despite numerous developments, the design of efficient optimization algorithms for the PageRank problem is still a challenge. Here, we propose three new algorithms with a linear time complexity for solving the problem over a bounded-degree graph. The idea behind them is to set up the PageRank as a convex minimization problem over a unit simplex, and then solve it using iterative methods with small iteration complexity. Our theoretical results are supported by an extensive empirical justification using real-world and simulated data.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Identification of Critical Infrastructure via PageRank

Assessing critical infrastructure vulnerabilities is paramount to arranging efficient plans for their protection. Critical infrastructures are cyber-physical systems that can be represented as a network consisting of nodes and edges and highly interdependent in nature. Given the interdependent nature of critical infrastuctures, failure in one node may cause failure in many others resulting in a cascade of failures. In this paper, we propose a node criticality metric that uses Google’s PageRank algorithm to identify nodes that are likely to fail (are vulnerable), nodes whose failure may cascade to many other sites in the network (are important), and nodes that are both vulnerable and important (are critical). We then present a series of experiments to understand how protecting certain critical nodes can help mitigate massive cascading failures. Simulating failures in a real-world network with and without critical node protections demonstrates the importance of identifying critical nodes in an infrastructure network.

Kay, Bill↗

Distribution of centrality measures on undirected random networks via the cavity method

The Katz centrality of a node in a complex network is a measure of the node’s importance as far as the flow of information across the network is concerned. For ensembles of locally tree-like undirected random graphs, this observable is a random variable. Its full probability distribution is of interest but difficult to handle analytically because of its “global” character and its definition in terms of a matrix inverse. Leveraging a fast Gaussian Belief Propagation-Cavity algorithm to solve linear systems on tree-like structures, we show that i) the Katz centrality of a single instance can be computed recursively in a very fast way, and ii) the probability P ( K ) that a random node in the ensemble of undirected random graphs has centrality K satisfies a set of recursive distributional equations, which can be analytically characterized and efficiently solved using a population dynamics algorithm. We test our solution on ensembles of Erdős-Rényi and Scale Free networks in the locally tree-like regime, with excellent agreement. The analytical distribution of centrality for the configuration model conditioned on the degree of each node can be employed as a benchmark to identify nodes of empirical networks with over- and underexpressed centrality relative to a null baseline. We also provide an approximate formula based on a rank- 1 projection that works well if the network is not too sparse, and we argue that an extension of our method could be efficiently extended to tackle analytical distributions of other centrality measures such as PageRank for directed networks in a transparent and user-friendly way.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Active Betweenness Cardinality: Algorithms and Applications

Centrality rankings such as degree, closeness, betweenness, Katz, PageRank, etc. are commonly used to identify critical nodes in a graph. These methods are based on two assumptions that restrict their wider applicability. First, they assume the exact topology of the network is available. Secondly, they do not take into account the activity over the network and only rely on its topology. However, in many applications, the network is autonomous, vast, and distributed, and it is hard to collect the exact topology. At the same time, the underlying pairwise activity between node pairs is not uniform and node criticality strongly depends on the activity on the underlying network. In this paper, we propose active betweenness cardinality, as a new measure, where the node criticalities are based on not the static structure, but the activity of the network. We show how this metric can be computed efficiently by using only local information for a given node and how we can find the most critical nodes starting from only a few nodes. We also show how this metric can be used to monitor a network and identify failed nodes. We present experimental results to show effectiveness by demonstrating how the failed nodes can be identified by measuring active betweenness cardinality of a few nodes in the system.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Exploring the Value of Nodes with Multicommunity Membership for Classification with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks

Sampling is an important step in the machine learning process because it prioritizes samples that help the model best summarize the important concepts required for the task at hand. The process of determining the best sampling method has been rarely studied in the context of graph neural networks. In this paper, we evaluate multiple sampling methods (i.e., ascending and descending) that sample based off different definitions of centrality (i.e., Voterank, Pagerank, degree) to observe its relation with network topology. We find that no sampling method is superior across all network topologies. Additionally, we find situations where ascending sampling provides better classification scores, showing the strength of weak ties. Two strategies are then created to predict the best sampling method, one that observes the homogeneous connectivity of the nodes, and one that observes the network topology. In both methods, we are able to evaluate the best sampling direction consistently.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Evaluation of Graph Analytics Frameworks Using the GAP Benchmark Suite

The analysis of connected data is an increasingly important application in high-performance computing. Such analyses can reveal fraudulent patterns in financial transactions, optimize telecommunications networks, predict information flow in social networks, etc. However, the landscape of graph analytics is highly diverse. Graph algorithms stress processor architectures differently, and no one graph can represent all topologies. Consequently, no single approach or framework is expected to be optimal for all graph analytics problems. To help make sense of this diverse landscape, we evaluated four approaches to graph analytics: GraphBLAS, Galois, BGL17, GraphIt; and compare them against hand-tuned implementations that take advantage of hardware features on our test platform. Graph- BLAS formulates graph analytics as sparse linear algebra. Galois provides syntactic constructs for data parallelism over irregular data structures. BGL17 is a generic C++ template library for implementing graph algorithms. GraphIt provides a domain- specific language to describe and optimize graph algorithms. We use the GAP Benchmark Suite to establish baseline performance and guide the side-by-side evaluation of each framework. GAP consists of 30 tests: six graph analytics algorithms (breadth- first search, single-source shortest path, PageRank, betweenness centrality, connected components, and triangle counting) run on five graphs, each with different topological characteristics (e.g., high diameter, skewed degree distribution, high average degree). High-performance reference implementations are included for each benchmark algorithm. Because a graph can be loaded into memory a number of ways (e.g., flat file on disk, compressed sparse format, data frames, retrieved from SQL or NoSQL databases), our evaluation focused on computational performance rather than I/O. Our results show the relative strengths of each framework.

Graph algorithms, Benchmarking, shared-memory prog↗