Discrete-time open quantum walks for vertex ranking in graphs

This article presents a new quantum PageRank algorithm on graphs using discrete-time open quantum walks. Google's PageRank is a widely used algorithm for ranking the web pages on the world wide web in classical computation. From a broader perspective, it is also a fundamental measure for quantifying the importance of vertices in a network. Similarly, the new quantum PageRank also serves to quantify the significance of a network's vertices. In this work, we extend the concept of discrete-time open quantum walk on arbitrary directed and undirected graphs by utilizing the Weyl operators as Kraus operators. This new model of quantum walk is useful for building up the quantum PageRank algorithm, discussed in this article. We compare the classical PageRank and the newly defined quantum PageRank for different types of complex networks, such as the scale-free network, Erdős-Rényi random network, Watts-Strogatz network, spatial network, Zachary Karate club network, GNC, GN, GNR networks, Barabási and Albert network, etc. In addition, we study the convergence of the quantum PageRank process and its dependency on the damping factor α. We observe that this quantum PageRank procedure is faster than many other proposals reported in the literature.