Graph partitioning and a componentwise PageRank algorithm

In this article we will present a graph partitioning algorithm which partitions a graph into two different types of components: the well-known ‘strongly connected components’ as well as another type of components we call ‘connected acyclic component’. We will give an algorithm based on Tarjan’s algorithm for finding strongly connected components used to find such a partitioning. We will also show that the partitioning given by the algorithm is unique and that the underlying graph can be represented as a directed acyclic graph (similar to a pure strongly connected component partitioning). In the second part we will show how such an partitioning of a graph can be used to calculate PageRank of a graph effectively by calculating PageRank for different components on the same ‘level’ in parallel as well as allowing for the use of different types of PageRank algorithms for different types of components. To evaluate the method we have calculated PageRank on four large example graphs and compared it with a basic approach, as well as our algorithm in a serial as well as parallel implementation.