Embedding with PageRank

 Personalized PageRank with high teleportation probability enables exploring the environment of a seed. With this insight, one can use an orthogonal factorization of a set of personalized PageRank vectors, like SVD, to derive a 2-dimensional representation of the network. This can be done for the whole network or a smaller piece. The power of this method lies in the fact that only a few columns, compared to the size of the networks, can be used to generate a local representation of the part of the network we are interested in. This technique has the potential to be seamlessly used for higher order structures, such as hypergraphs which have found a great deal of use for real-world data. This work investigates the characteristics of personalized PageRank and how it compares to the transition probabilities on the graph in terms of their ability to develop low dimensional representations. A key focus of the thesis are the similarities between the embeddings generated due to PageRank and those generated by spectral methods.