Strong Localization in Personalized PageRank Vectors

The personalized PageRank diffusion is a fundamental tool in network analysis tasks like community detection and link prediction. It models the spread of a quantity from a set of seed nodes, and it has been observed to stay localized near this seed set. We derive an upper-bound on the number of entries necessary to approximate a personalized PageRank vector in graphs with skewed degree sequences. This bound shows localization under mild assumptions on the maximum and minimum degrees. Experimental results on random graphs with these degree sequences show the bound is loose and support a conjectured bound.