PageRank computation for Higher-Order Networks

Abstract: Higher-order networks are efficient representations of sequential data. Unlike the classic first-order network approach, they capture indirect dependencies between items composing the input sequences by the use of \textit{memory-nodes}. We focus in this study on the variable-order network model introduced in [Xu et al. (2016);Saebi et al. (2020)]. Authors suggested that random-walk-based mining tools can be directly applied to these networks. We discuss the case of the PageRank measure. We show the existence of a bias due to the distribution of the number of representations of the items. We propose an adaptation of the PageRank model in order to correct it. Application on real-world data shows important differences in the achieved rankings. \keywords{Higher-order Networks, Sequential data, Random walks, PageRank