Fast computation of SimRank for static and dynamic information networks

Information networks are ubiquitous in many applications and analysis on such networks has attracted significant attention in the academic communities. One of the most important aspects of information network analysis is to measure similarity between nodes in a network. SimRank is a simple and influential measure of this kind, based on a solid theoretical "random surfer" model. Existing work computes SimRank similarity scores in an iterative mode. We argue that the iterative method can be infeasible and inefficient when, as in many real-world scenarios, the networks change dynamically and frequently. We envision non-iterative method to bridge the gap. It allows users not only to update the similarity scores incrementally, but also to derive similarity scores for an arbitrary subset of nodes. To enable the non-iterative computation, we propose to rewrite the SimRank equation into a non-iterative form by using the Kronecker product and vectorization operators. Based on this, we develop a family of novel approximate SimRank computation algorithms for static and dynamic information networks, and give their corresponding theoretical justification and analysis. The non-iterative method supports efficient processing of various node analysis including similarity tracking and centrality tracking on evolving information networks. The effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods are evaluated on synthetic and real data sets.