Applicability of PageRank to other industries
PageRank’s idea has revolutionized the way that the web is viewed and in a sense, given it structure. PageRank essentially is able to tell you, based on the number of links to other pages and references, the importance or relevance of one specific page or website, where the ones that are valued more highly are the ones who have the most links pointing to them from other websites. This is really a great way to organize and thing about the industry. So what about other industries?
There actually now exists an equivalent for the financial industries and it’s called DebtRank. The premise behind DebtRank is basically the same as PageRank except it concerns debt instead of website pages, as the name would imply. The motivation behind it is that if companies with debt that is really widespread fail, they will have repercussions on a bigger portion of entities and cause more damage than other companies that might have a more narrowly focused source of debt.
Thinking about the way that such methods help us better understand the cumulative effect that certain events have, for example the posting of a picture on someone’s blog or the failed effort to pay back debt, is really amazing and are incredibly important tools in terms of making more informed decisions.
It would therefore be interesting to think further about the potential use of this logic for other industries in order to better understand our surroundings and the effects that these connections might have. In fact, there has been a lot of effort already within the medical industry such as the extinction of species, lung cancer and the way that cancerous cells propagate, and many more.
https://medium.com/@mark__buchanan/how-googles-algorithm-could-fix-the-financial-system-72ab84f25e83#.9qn4jh393
https://gigaom.com/2013/03/26/how-researchers-are-fighting-lung-cancer-using-pagerank/