Robust Eigenvector of a Stochastic Matrix with Application to PageRank

Anatoli Juditsky, Boris Polyak

Published 2012-06-21Version 1

We discuss a definition of robust dominant eigenvector of a family of stochastic matrices. Our focus is on application to ranking problems, where the proposed approach can be seen as a robust alternative to the standard PageRank technique. The robust eigenvector computation is reduced to a convex optimization problem. We also propose a simple algorithm for robust eigenvector approximation which can be viewed as a regularized power method with a special stopping rule.