Reference implementation of SPEAR algorithm released

I have released the reference implementation of our SPEAR ranking algorithm. The library is written in the Python programming language, and should be straight-forward to use. You can install the library via Python’s setuptools or download it directly from GitHub.

Here’s a quick example on how to use it from the Python interpreter:

>>> import spear
>>> activities = [
... (datetime.datetime(2010,7,1,9,0,0), "alice", "http://www.michael-noll.com/"),
... (datetime.datetime(2010,8,1,12,45,0), "bob", "http://www.michael-noll.com/"),
... ]
>>> spear_algorithm = spear.Spear(activities)
>>> expertise_results, quality_results = spear_algorithm.run()

Get the top user and his expertise score:

>>> expertise_score, user = expertise_results[0]
>>> print "%s => %.4f" % (user, expertise_score)
alice => 0.5858

Get the top resource and its quality score:

>>> quality_score, resource = quality_results[0]
>>> print "%s => %.4f" % (resource, quality_score)
http://www.michael-noll.com/ => 1.0000

You can also use the library to simulate the HITS algorithm of Jon Kleinberg. Simply supply a credit score function C(x) = 1 to the SPEAR algorithm (see the documentation of the Spear.run() method).

Feel free to play around with it and send me feedback!