Efficient Edge Rewiring Strategies for Enhancing PageRank Fairness

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, linear-time algorithm for rewiring social network edges to improve PageRank fairness for disadvantaged groups, demonstrated through extensive experiments on large real-world networks.

Contribution

It presents a novel, efficient greedy algorithm leveraging rooted spanning forest sampling to enhance PageRank fairness by network rewiring.

Findings

Significantly outperforms existing algorithms.

Capable of handling networks with millions of nodes.

Achieves solutions in just a few minutes.

Abstract

We study the notion of unfairness in social networks, where a group such as females in a male-dominated industry are disadvantaged in access to important information, e.g. job posts, due to their less favorable positions in the network. We investigate a well-established network-based formulation of fairness called PageRank fairness, which refers to a fair allocation of the PageRank weights among distinct groups. Our goal is to enhance the PageRank fairness by modifying the underlying network structure. More precisely, we study the problem of maximizing PageRank fairness with respect to a disadvantaged group, when we are permitted to rewire a fixed number of edges in the network. Building on a greedy approach, we leverage techniques from fast sampling of rooted spanning forests to devise an effective linear-time algorithm for this problem. To evaluate the accuracy and performance of our proposed algorithm, we conduct a large set of experiments on various real-world network data. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the existing ones. Our algorithm is capable of generating accurate solutions for networks of million nodes in just a few minutes.