Fast Approximate CoSimRanks via Random Projections

Abstract: Given a graph $G$ with $n$ nodes and two nodes $u,v\in G$, the {\em CoSimRank} value $s(u,v)$ quantifies the similarity between $u$ and $v$ based on graph topology. Compared to SimRank, CoSimRank is shown to be more accurate and effective in many real-world applications, including synonym expansion, lexicon extraction, and entity relatedness in knowledge graphs. The computation of all pairwise CoSimRanks in $G$ is highly expensive and challenging. Existing solutions all focus on devising approximate algorithms for the computation of all pairwise CoSimRanks. To attain a desired absolute accuracy guarantee $\epsilon$, the state-of-the-art approximate algorithm for computing all pairwise CoSimRanks requires $O(n^3\log_2(\ln(\frac{1}{\epsilon})))$ time, which is prohibitively expensive even though $\epsilon$ is large. In this paper, we propose \rsim, a fast randomized algorithm for computing all pairwise CoSimRank values. The basic idea of \rsim is to approximate the $n\times n$ matrix multiplications in CoSimRank computation via random projection. Theoretically, \rsim runs in $O(\frac{n^2\ln(n)}{\epsilon^2}\ln(\frac{1}{\epsilon}))$ time and meanwhile ensures an absolute error of at most $\epsilon$ in each CoSimRank value in $G$ with a high probability. Extensive experiments using six real graphs demonstrate that \rsim is more than orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art. In particular, on a million-edge Twitter graph, \rsim answers the $\epsilon$-approximate ($\epsilon=0.1$) all pairwise CoSimRank query within 4 hours, using a single commodity server, while existing solutions fail to terminate within a day.