Adaptive Methods for the Computation of PageRank

Abstract

We observe that the convergence patterns of pages in the PageRank algorithm have a nonuniform distribution. Specifically, many pages converge to their true PageRank quickly, while relatively few pages take a much longer time to converge. Furthermore, we observe that these slow-converging pages are generally those pages with high PageRank. We use this observation to devise a simple algorithm to speed up the computation of PageRank, in which the PageRank of pages that have converged are not recomputed at each iteration after convergence. This algorithm, which we call Adaptive PageRank, speeds up the computation of PageRank by nearly 30\%.