MapReduce-Based SimRank Computation and Its Application in Social Recommender System

Recently there has been a lot of interest in graph-based analysis, with examples including social network analysis, recommendation systems, document classification and clustering, and so on. A graph is an abstraction that naturally captures data objects as well as relationships among those objects. Objects are represented as nodes and relationships are represented as edges in the graph. There are many cases in which similarities among nodes are required to compute. SimRank is one of the simple and intuitive algorithms for this purpose. It is rigidly based on the random walk theorem. Existing methods on SimRank computation suffer from one limitation: the computing cost can be very high in practice. In order to optimize the computation of SimRank, a few techniques have been proposed. However, the performance of these methods are still limited by the processing ability of the single computer. Ideally, we would like to develop new parallel solutions that can offer improved processing power to compute SimRank on large data set. In this paper, we propose parallel algorithms for SimRank computation on Map-Reduce framework, and more specifically its open source implementation, Hadoop. Two different parallel methods are proposed and their performances are evaluated and compared. Furthermore, we employ the proposed methods to do the similarity computation in order to recommend appropriate products to users in social recommender systems.