Link Fusion: A Unified Link Analysis Framework for Multi-Type Interrelated Data Objects

Web link analysis has proven to be a significant enhancement for quality based web search. Most existing links can be classified into two categories: intra-type links (e.g., web hyperlinks), which represent the relationship of data objects within a homogeneous data type (web pages), and inter-type links (e.g., user browsing log) which represent the relationship of data objects across different data types (users and web pages). Unfortunately, most link analysis research only considers one type of link. In this paper, we propose a unified link analysis framework, called “link fusion”, which considers both the inter- and intra- type link structure among multiple-type inter-related data objects and brings order to objects in each data type at the same time. The PageRank and HITS algorithms are shown to be special cases of our unified link analysis framework. Experiments on an instantiation of the framework that makes use of the user data and web pages extracted from a proxy log show that our proposed algorithm could improve the search effectiveness over the HITS and DirectHit algorithms by 24.6% and 38.2% respectively.