Local Methods for Estimating SimRank Score

SimRank is a well known algorithm which conducts link analysis to measure similarity between each pair of nodes (nodepair). But it suffers from high computational cost, limiting its usage in large-scale datasets. Moreover, Links between nodes are changing over time. It may be desirable to quickly approximate the similarity score between certain nodepair without performing a large-scale computation on the entire graph. In our approach we propose a method to efficiently estimate the similarity score using only a small subgraph of the entire graph. We call this novel algorithm “Local-SimRank”. The experimental results conducted on real datasets and synthetic dataset show that our algorithm efficiently produces good approximations to the global SimRank scores. Meanwhile, we prove that the Local-SimRank score LS(a, b) is always less than original SimRank score S(a, b) mathematically.