Reverse top-k search using random walk with restart

With the increasing popularity of social networks, large volumes of graph data are becoming available. Large graphs are also derived by structure extraction from relational, text, or scientific data (e.g., relational tuple networks, citation graphs, ontology networks, protein-protein interaction graphs). Node-to-node proximity is the key building block for many graph-based applications that search or analyze the data. Among various proximity measures, random walk with restart (RWR) is widely adopted because of its ability to consider the global structure of the whole network. Although RWR-based similarity search has been well studied before, there is no prior work on reverse top-k proximity search in graphs based on RWR. We discuss the applicability of this query and show that its direct evaluation using existing methods on RWR-based similarity search has very high computational and storage demands. To address this issue, we propose an indexing technique, paired with an on-line reverse top-k search algorithm. Our experiments show that our technique is efficient and has manageable storage requirements even when applied on very large graphs.