Lightweight label propagation for large-scale network data

Abstract

Label propagation spreads the soft labels from few labeled data to a large amount of unlabeled data according to the intrinsic graph structure. Nonetheless, most label propagation solutions work under relatively small-scale data and fail to cope with many real applications, such as social network analysis, where graphs usually have millions of nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named SLP to deal with large-scale data. A lightweight iterative process derived from the well-known stochastic gradient descent strategy is used to reduce memory overhead and accelerate the solving process. We also give a theoretical analysis on the necessity of the warm-start technique for label propagation. Experiments show that our algorithm can handle million-scale graphs in few seconds while achieving highly competitive performance with existing algorithms.