Reduce and aggregate: similarity ranking in multi-categorical bipartite graphs

We study the problem of computing similarity rankings in large-scale multi-categorical bipartite graphs, where the two sides of the graph represent actors and items, and the items are partitioned into an arbitrary set of categories. The problem has several real-world applications, including identifying competing advertisers and suggesting related queries in an online advertising system or finding users with similar interests and suggesting content to them. In these settings, we are interested in computing on-the-fly rankings of similar actors, given an actor and an arbitrary subset of categories of interest. Two main challenges arise: First, the bipartite graphs are huge and often lopsided (e.g. the system might receive billions of queries while presenting only millions of advertisers). Second, the sheer number of possible combinations of categories prevents the pre-computation of the results for all of them. We present a novel algorithmic framework that addresses both issues for the computation of several graph-theoretical similarity measures, including # common neighbors, and Personalized PageRank. We show how to tackle the imbalance in the graphs to speed up the computation and provide efficient real-time algorithms for computing rankings for an arbitrary subset of categories. Finally, we show experimentally the accuracy of our approach with real-world data, using both public graphs and a very large dataset from Google AdWords.