Incorporating the Concept of Distance into PageRank's Notion of Teleportation

Bowater, David William

Incorporating the Concept of Distance into PageRank's Notion of Teleportation

dc.contributor.advisor	Stefanakis, Emmanuel
dc.contributor.author	Bowater, David William
dc.contributor.committeemember	Wang, Xin
dc.contributor.committeemember	Liang, Hung-Ling (Steve)
dc.contributor.committeemember	Samavati, Faramarz Famil
dc.contributor.committeemember	Jabari, Shabnam
dc.date	2024-05
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-17T15:45:18Z
dc.date.available	2024-04-17T15:45:18Z
dc.date.issued	2024-04-15
dc.description.abstract	Centrality measures are a valuable tool for analysing complex networks because they help us to identify the most important or central nodes in a network. One of the most popular measures of centrality is PageRank which, despite being originally introduced for ranking web pages, has found widespread use in applications far beyond the web due to its simplicity and generality. However, in many real-world networks, the notion of teleportation is counterintuitive because it implies that whatever is moving around the network will jump or 'teleport' directly from one node to any other, without considering how far apart the nodes are. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is to incorporate the concept of distance into the notion of teleportation, which is accomplished by drawing upon recent advances in non-local random walks. First, an existing PageRank-based centrality measure is extended to improve its suitability for urban street networks. Then, a general measure of PageRank centrality is proposed which can be tailored for various real-world networks and applications. To evaluate the proposed measures, experiments on a variety of real-world spatial and social networks are performed. Finally, to improve our understanding of distance-based teleportation in real-world networks, an analysis of the effect of the damping factor on the rating and ranking of nodes is provided.
dc.identifier.citation	Bowater, D. W. (2024). Incorporating the concept of distance into PageRank's notion of teleportation (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1880/118422
dc.language.iso	en
dc.publisher.faculty	Graduate Studies
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.subject	Complex Networks
dc.subject	Centrality Measures
dc.subject.classification	Engineering
dc.title	Incorporating the Concept of Distance into PageRank's Notion of Teleportation
dc.type	doctoral thesis
thesis.degree.discipline	Engineering – Geomatics
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary
thesis.degree.name	Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
ucalgary.thesis.accesssetbystudent	I do not require a thesis withhold – my thesis will have open access and can be viewed and downloaded publicly as soon as possible.