English

Mixing time of PageRank surfers on sparse random digraphs

Probability 2021-02-02 v3 Combinatorics

Abstract

We consider the generalised PageRank walk on a digraph GG, with refresh probability α\alpha and resampling distribution λ\lambda. We analyse convergence to stationarity when GG is a large sparse random digraph with given degree sequences, in the limit of vanishing α\alpha. We identify three scenarios: when α\alpha is much smaller than the inverse of the mixing time of GG the relaxation to equilibrium is dominated by the simple random walk and displays a cutoff behaviour; when α\alpha is much larger than the inverse of the mixing time of GG on the contrary one has pure exponential decay with rate α\alpha; when α\alpha is comparable to the inverse of the mixing time of GG there is a mixed behaviour interpolating between cutoff and exponential decay. This trichotomy is shown to hold uniformly in the starting point and uniformly in the resampling distribution λ\lambda.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.04993,
  title  = {Mixing time of PageRank surfers on sparse random digraphs},
  author = {Pietro Caputo and Matteo Quattropani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.04993},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

28 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:04:37.615Z