Exact Single-Source SimRank Computation on Large Graphs

SimRank is a popular measurement for evaluating the node-to-node similarities based on the graph topology. In recent years, single-source and top-k SimRank queries have received increasing attention due to their applications in web mining, social network analysis, and spam detection. However, a fundamental obstacle in studying SimRank has been the lack of ground truths. The only exact algorithm, Power Method, is computationally infeasible on graphs with more than 106 nodes. Consequently, no existing work has evaluated the actual trade-offs between query time and accuracy on large real-world graphs. In this paper, we present ExSim, the first algorithm that computes the exact single-source and top-k SimRank results on large graphs. With high probability, this algorithm produces ground truths with a rigorous theoretical guarantee. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate the efficiency of ExactSim. The results show that ExactSim provides the ground truth for any single-source SimRank query with a precision up to 7 decimal places within a reasonable query time.