Efficient Edge Rewiring Strategies for Enhancing PageRank Fairness

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Changan, Sun, Haoxin, Zehmakan, Ahad N., Zhang, Zhongzhi
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Liu, Changan
Sun, Haoxin
Zehmakan, Ahad N.
Zhang, Zhongzhi
author_facet Liu, Changan
Sun, Haoxin
Zehmakan, Ahad N.
Zhang, Zhongzhi
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02512
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Edge Rewiring Strategies for Enhancing PageRank Fairness
Liu, Changan
Sun, Haoxin
Zehmakan, Ahad N.
Zhang, Zhongzhi
Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
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.
title Efficient Edge Rewiring Strategies for Enhancing PageRank Fairness
topic Social and Information Networks
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02512