Journal of Applied Science and Engineering, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 655-662 (2018) DOI: 10.6180/jase.201812_21(4).

0019

Applying Page Rank and HITS Algorithm to Identify

Key Use Cases
Sangeeta Sabharwal, Preeti Kaur* and Ritu Sibal
Department of Computer Engineering, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, University of Delhi,
Sector 3, Dwarka, Delhi, India

Abstract
The unified modelling language (UML) is extensively used for modelling user requirements by
developers and researchers. Use case diagram (UCD) is a prominent UML diagram used for modelling
functional requirements. It is used for depicting the functional requirements of the system and also acts
as a starting point for rest of the diagrams of UML. As the size and complexity of the software being
developed increases, the use case diagram also gets increasingly complicated. The goal of this paper is
to enhance the quality of the use case driven development process. In this paper an approach is
proposed to find key/important use cases in the UCD using two graph ranking algorithms namely Page
Rank and HITS-Hypertext Induced Topic Search. Identification of key use cases guides the software
developer to prioritize the implementation of use cases in UCD. The proposed approach shows reliable
results in accordance with human thinking.

Key Words: Use Case Diagram, Use Case Control Flow Graph, Page Rank and HITS Algorithm

1. Introduction Early analysis of the requirements of a large system

Modelling of software system requirements using
UML is a practice widely adopted in industry as well as
in software research. The structure and behaviour of the
system under development is initially analysed by using
various types of UML diagrams. Use case diagram (UCD),
an important diagram of the UML, provides a simple gra-
phical illustration of the system from the user’s perspec-
tive. UCD tries to systematically identify the requirements
of the system being developed [1]. UCD modelling is
also being used by researchers for finding the metrics
which could help developers to analyse the complexity
of the system in early phase of software development. As
the complexity and size of the software systems are ra-
pidly growing, the UCD drawn to capture the require-
ments is becoming more and more complicated. The un-
derstand ability and read ability of the UCD is also af-
fected with its increasing complexity [2].
*Corresponding author. E-mail: preetikaur1@rediffmail.com
under development may result in a complex, large use
case diagram with many use cases. From the use cases so
evolved, it becomes important to find the key use case(s),
as its identification indicates that the particular use case
is absolutely necessary for the completion of other use
case(s) dependent on it. These key use cases or require-
ments should be given more attention and time during
development in order to effectively manage the complex
software development process. Moreover, in use case
driven software development approach, the use cases are
significant input for the identification of classes and their
methods. This implies that the identification of impor-
tant use cases may also assist in finding important classes.
Additionally, it can guide the developer to prioritize the
implementation of different use cases during software
development.
In this paper, we have proposed an approach to iden-
tify the important use case(s) in the UCD of a system us-
ing Page Rank and HITS algorithms. Page Rank algori-
thm [3] was originally used for web structure mining and
656 Sangeeta Sabharwal et al.
analysis. HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Search) algo-
rithm [14] uses the web’s hyperlink structure to find the
authority and hub scores for each page. The main objec-
tives of our work are: (i) to determine the structural cohe-
sion among the use cases using dependency relationships
that exist in the UCD and represent them through a con-
trol flow graph called Use Case Control Flow Graph
(UCFG), (ii) to find the important use cases by applying
Page Rank algorithm and weighted Page Rank algorithm
on the UCFG, (iii) to find the important use cases by
computing hub scores by applying HITS algorithm on
the UCFG, (iv) to compare and analyze of the results ob-
tained by the application of Page Rank and HITS algo-
rithms. Application of these algorithms helps in identify-
ing important use cases thereby prioritizing the underly-
ing requirements of the system to be developed. Error free
and efficient implementation of the important use case(s),
thus identified, is essential due to the dependency of sev-
eral other use cases on it. This information about the key
use case(s) can help the developers to prioritize the use
cases in order to effectively implement them.
The paper consists of five sections. Section 2 describes
the related work and background about Page Rank and
HITS algorithm. Section 3 describes the proposed ap-
proach to identify key use cases in the UCD and illustrates
it with an example. In section 4 results are discussed. Fi-
nally, section 5 describes the conclusion and the future
work.
2. Related Work and Background
Page Rank is a web Page Ranking algorithm proposed
by Page et al. [3] based on the concept of arranging pages
in a structured graph. Page Rank algorithm and its differ-
ent versions are used in many domains. In the field of
software engineering, Page Rank has been applied to an-
alyze different software artifacts. Software metric based
on Page Rank, known as Coderank [4] is computed for
artifacts like classes of a system to measure their impor-
tance along with their visualization and interpretation.
Component rank technique [5] finds the most useful com-
ponent available for reuse in multiple software libraries.
Page Rank has also been applied to class diagram to mea-
sure complexity of relationships among the classes in
[6]. Page Rank along with HITS is used by Yuming and
Baowen in order to measure importance of classes in a
class diagram [7]. Page Rank is also used to assess the
impact of concern changes in [8] by identifying concerns
at requirements level and deriving concern relationship
graph. Rank directed method based on Page Rank cap-
tures the difference in relationships among classes to
identify significant classes [9]. An approach to find im-
proved coupling metrics by considering weight of me-
thods based on Page Rank is also proposed by Park et al.
in [10]. The importance of objects, classes, and methods
is determined by applying Page Rank to software arti-
facts and their relationship by Perin et al. in [11]. Huang
et al. [12] proposed an algorithm for ranking classes in
class diagram using Page Rank algorithm. Yadav and Khan
[13] proposed a coupling complexity normalization (CCN)
metric to minimize complexity of object-oriented designs
and used Page Rank algorithm to measure relationship
among classes.
HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Search) algorithm
has been proposed by Kleinberg [14]. It is a web mining
algorithm which represented internet as a large directed
graph to find most important web pages for a query.
Zaidman and Demeyer [15] used HITS to find the impor-
tant classes in the system. They applied HITS on Argo-
UML case tool to analyze dynamic coupling among classes
and found that for early system understanding, 10% classes
of any system should be considered as key classes. HITS
has also been applied to find the class authoritative com-
plexity in class diagram which can be used to sort classes
by Tong [16]. The HITS algorithm is applied by Alexan-
der in [17] to evaluate the quality of class diagram.
Though we can find several approaches in literature
where Page Rank and HITS algorithms are applied on
the class diagram, to the best of our knowledge, these have
not been applied to other UML diagrams such as use case
diagram. In this paper, we have proposed an approach to
apply Page Rank and HITS algorithm on UCD to iden-
tify the key use case(s) of the system.
2.1 Page Rank and HITS Algorithm
Brief description of the Page Rank algorithm and
HITS algorithm, is given in this section.
2.1.1 Page Rank Algorithm
Google search engine is widely used for searching
 Applying Page Rank and HITS Algorithm to Identify Key Use Cases
web pages on the internet [3]. It uses link structure of the
web to calculate rank of each web page and this ranking
is called Page Rank of a page. Each webpage in a Page
Rank algorithm [3] is represented by a node of the graph
and edges show the links among the pages. The Page
Rank algorithm measures the importance of a web page.
A web page is considered as important only if it has more
number of web links pointing towards it from other pages.
The rank of a webpage is calculated by adding the ranks
of the pages that point towards it. The combined rank of
all web pages is 1.
The basic Page Rank algorithm [3] is described by
the following equation
PR ( u) = (1 - d ) + d ´ åvÎP (u) PR ( v ) N ( v )
where u and v represent nodes i.e. webpages. PR(u) is
the Page Rank of page u and P(u) belongs to the set of
pages that point to u. PR(v) is the Page Rank of page v.
N(v) is the total number of outgoing links of page v. ‘d’
is the damping factor having value between 0 and 1 and
is usually 0.85. The pages having no outgoing links af-
fect the rank score adversely.
2.1.2 HITS Algorithm
HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Search) proposed
by Kleinberg, is a graph-based web mining algorithm
where internet is considered as a large directed graph
[14]. For a particular query, most relevant and important
web pages are identified based on the hyperlink structure.
Each page is a node and edge is a hyperlink in the di-
rected graph. Authority of a page is the number of in
links of page and shows that how informative a particu-
lar page is. Hub on the other hand is the number of out
links of a page i.e. it’s link with other informative pages.
So, each page has two scores - an authority score and
hub score that are used to rank each page on the network
for importance. A page has a good authority score if sev-
eral hubs point to it and similarly good hub score if it
points to many authorities. For a page i, hub score hi and
an authority score ai is calculated using the equation (2)
a i(k) = å jÎI h jk- i , hi(k) = å jÎO a jk- i
i i
where I are the in links to the page and O are the out
657
links from the page.
The directed graph is next converted to connectivity
matrix M. If there is an edge from node i to node j in the
directed graph, value 1 is written in the matrix and 0 oth-
erwise. Next step is to execute equation (3) iteratively
with the matrix M and normalise the h and a score to get
the final hub and authority score for a page i. Initial value
assigned to h and a score is 1.
a(k) = MT h(k-1), h(k) = Ma(k-1) (3)
3. Identifying Key Use Cases Using Page
Rank Algorithm
(1) As use case diagram is the starting point of our pro-
posed approach, we have followed the syntax and se-
mantics for creating use case diagram having elements
Actor, Use Case, Association, Generalization, <include>
and <extend> relationships, given in [1,2].
In our approach, we transform the UCD into a di-
rected graph called use case control flow graph (UCFG)
showing the flow of control among different use cases
and actors in the use case diagram. UCFG has a set of
nodes N and set of edges E where each node corresponds
to use case/actor and each edge corresponds to the rela-
tionship among use cases or between use case and actor,
in the use case diagram. Following are the steps of the
proposed approach.
1. Assign a number to each use case in the UCD and al-
phanumeric short form to each actor.
2. Convert UCD into UCFG.
3. Convert UCFG to connectivity matrix M. Make entry
in the matrix M according to the following equation
wt(i, j) = 1, if there is a relation between use case i and
use case j or actor A and use case i.
= 0, if no relation exists between use case i and
use case j or actor A and use case i.
The weight of edge j to i is also considered to be 1, as
we know that a use case i that calls another use case j
returns the control back to the calling use case after
execution. Similarly, if an actor A calls a particular
use case i then after execution it returns some values
(2) to the actor. Therefore, we consider the weight of the
edge returning from called use case in the connectiv-
ity matrix also.
658 Sangeeta Sabharwal et al.

4. Calculate the stochastic transition matrix ST as given 3.1 Demonstration of the Proposed Approach
below In this section, we illustrate the proposed approach
with an example UCD as shown in Figure 1. It consists of
ST ( i, j) = wt ( i, j) å j = 1 to n
wt ( i, j) (4) one actor and nineteen use cases. The UCD shows in-
clude and extend relationships among use cases. For ex-
where ST is n ´ n matrix. ample, use case (6) has an include relationship with use
5. Execute the Page Rank algorithm using equation (1) case (9), (10) and extend relationship with use case (19).
on the stochastic matrix ST to get the rank scores of all Use case control flow graph (UCFG) for the UCD is
the use cases using Matlab. shown in Figure 2. The control flow between the actor

Figure 1. Example use case diagram.

Figure 2. UCFG of example use case diagram.

 Applying Page Rank and HITS Algorithm to Identify Key Use Cases 659

and use case is represented with an arrow from an actor Table 3. Rank of the use cases/actor in the example use
to the use case and another arrow from use case to the ac- case diagram
tor to show return of control to the actor. Similarly, the Use Rank score Rank score Rank score
flow of control among the use cases having include and case/actor (d = 0.85) (d = 0.70) (d = 0.50)
extend relationship is also shown in the UCFG. A 0.0905 0.0801 0.0678
The use case control flow graph is next transformed 1 0.0701 0.0633 0.0564
into matrix M as illustrated in Table 1. The UCFG is 2 0.0760 0.0739 0.0701
3 0.0760 0.0739 0.0701
transformed into matrix M by assigning 1 for the pres-
4 0.0724 0.0670 0.0606
ence of an edge among actors and use cases and 0 for ab- 5 0.0767 0.0753 0.0711
sence of an edge. For example, use case (1) has associa- 6 0.1007 0.0967 0.0883
tion with actor and is related to use cases (5) and (6). 7 0.0293 0.0325 0.0369
Therefore, 1 is marked under columns A, 5 and 6 for row 8 0.0293 0.0325 0.0369
9 0.0289 0.0318 0.0360
1. Similarly, all other entries are made in the matrix M.
10 0.0289 0.0318 0.0360
Next, the stochastic matrix ST is computed from ma- 11 0.0289 0.0323 0.0367
trix M and is shown in Table 2. The ST matrix is n by n 12 0.0289 0.0323 0.0367
matrix computed using equation (4), given in the pro- 13 0.0289 0.0323 0.0366
posed approach. 14 0.0289 0.0323 0.0366
The Page Rank algorithm was then applied on the 15 0.0535 0.0545 0.0544
16 0.0535 0.0545 0.0544
stochastic matrix M using equation (1) and the results
17 0.0302 0.0340 0.0386
obtained are shown in Table 3. The results in the Table 3 18 0.0302 0.0340 0.0386
show rank values for three different values of the damp- 19 0.0289 0.0318 0.0360
ing factor d i.e. d = 0.85, d = 0.70 and d = 0.50.
It is observed that the use case (6) has the highest 3.2 Identifying Key Use Cases Using Weighted
Page Rank value for different values of d, from Table 3. Page Rank
Hence, use case (6) is the key use case in UCD. General- In this section, we find the key use case using weighted
ization is not shown here. Rank of a generalized use case Page Rank and assign weights as
will be derived in the similar way as described above. wt(i, j) = 1, if there exists an include dependency be-
Table1. Matrix M corresponding to example use case diagram
A 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
A 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
4 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0
5 … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …
19 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Table 2. Stochastic transition matrix ST corresponding to matrix M

A 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
A 0 0.333 0.333 0.333 0.333 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 0.25 0 0 0 0 0.333 0.25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2 0.25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3 0.25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
4 0.25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.5 0.5 0 0 0
5 … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …
19 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.25 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
660 Sangeeta Sabharwal et al.

tween use case i and use case j or association between Table 4. Rank of the use cases/actor in the example use
actor A and use case i. case diagram using weighted Page Rank
= 0, if there is no relation between use case i and use Use Rank score Rank score Rank score
case j or actor A and use case i. case/actor (d = 0.85) (d = 0.70) (d = 0.50)
= 0.85, if there exists an extend dependency between A 0.0223 0.0209 0.0226
use case i and j. 1 0.0150 0.0154 0.0182
The edge between two use cases i and j, related th- 2 0.0191 0.0195 0.0234
3 0.0191 0.0195 0.0234
rough extend dependency is given weight less than 1 be-
4 0.0183 0.0177 0.0203
cause use case j will not be always called or executed and 5 0.0134 0.0159 0.0209
it will be conditionally called. Therefore, weight assigned 6 0.0210 0.0231 0.0280
with extend relation is 0.85. In this method, we have en- 7 0.0050 0.0070 0.0112
hanced Page Rank algorithm by integrating semantic in- 8 0.0050 0.0070 0.0112
9 0.0063 0.0079 0.0118
formation among the use cases in UCD. The weight as-
10 0.0063 0.0079 0.0118
sociated with the extend relationship is determined after 11 0.0072 0.0084 0.0122
performing experiments with different values such as 0.80, 12 0.0072 0.0084 0.0122
0.70, and 0.50 for which the results obtained were not 13 0.0072 0.0084 0.0122
correct and cohesive. The condition of Page Rank algo- 14 0.0072 0.0084 0.0122
rithm SPage Rank = 1 is not satisfied in the case of 15 0.0136 0.0143 0.0181
16 0.0136 0.0143 0.0181
weighted Page Rank algorithm.
17 0.0076 0.0089 0.0128
Weighted Page Rank algorithm is applied on the UCD 18 0.0076 0.0089 0.0128
to find the most important use case(s) in the similar man- 19 0.0056 0.0073 0.0112
ner as described in section 3. Firstly, the matrix M is cre-
ated from the UCFG which is then converted to stochas- according to the following equation and make entry in
tic matrix M using equation (3) with the difference of matrix M.
weight assigned for extend dependency among use cases wt(i, j) = 1, if there is a relation between use case i and
as 0.85 instead of 1. Then Page Rank algorithmis applied use case j or actor A and use case i.
using equation (1) and rank of all the use cases in the = 0, if no relation exists between use case i and
UCD is computed as shown in Table 4. The results in the use case j or actor A and use case i.
Table 4 also show the rank values for three different val- 4. Apply the hits algorithm using equation (3) on the ma-
ues of the damping factor d i.e. d = 0.85, d = 0.70 and d = trix M recursively and refine the score to get the final
0.50. The use case (6) has the highest rank therefore it is hub and authority score for the UCD. Initial value 1 is
the key use case of the example UCD. given to both authority and hub score.
The matrix M corresponding to the example use case
3.3 Identifying Key Use Cases Using HITS Algorithm diagram is shown in Table 5. The results are shown in Ta-
In this section, we will discuss our proposed appro- ble 6 after applying HITS algorithm on the matrix M. It is
ach for finding the key use cases in UCD using HITS al- again observed that the use case (6) is the most important
gorithm. To find the important use case(s) we will con- use case in the UCD as it has the maximum hub score
sider the hub score ranking as hub is considered to be a (but less than the hub score of the actor in UCD).
use case that is calling several other use cases. Following
steps are there in the proposed approach. 4. Results and Discussion
1. Assign a number to each use case in UCD starting
with 1 and alphanumeric name for each actor. In this section we compare and discuss the results.
2. Convert UCD into UCFG. The application of Page Rank on the use case diagram
3. Convert UCFG to connectivity matrix M. Calculate shows the importance of a use case, based on the rela-
the weight of relationship or link between the use cases tionships of a particular use case with actor and other use
 Applying Page Rank and HITS Algorithm to Identify Key Use Cases 661

Table 5. Matrix M corresponding to example use case diagram

A 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
A 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0
4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0
5 … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …
19 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Table 6. Rank of the use cases/actor in the example use example UCD (but less than rank of the actor in UCD).
case diagram using HITS algorithm The HITS algorithm is also applied with the UCD as
Use case/actor Authority score Hub score discussed in section 3.3. The HITS algorithm is applied
A 0.05 0.2105 by taking 1 for existence of edge in the UCFG and 0 oth-
1 0.05 0.1053 erwise. The results are shown in Table 6. They suggest
2 0.05 0.1053 that the hub score for the use case (6) is maximum and
3 0.05 0.1053 therefore it is the most important use case in the selected
4 0.05 0.1053
example use case diagram.
5 0.05 0.1053
6 0.05 0.1579 The successful coding and execution of highest rank-
7 0.05 0 ing use case is necessary as many other use cases are ei-
8 0.05 0 ther called by it or calling it. The use cases are appropri-
9 0.05 0 ately ranked and our objective to find the use case(s)
10 0.05 0 which is most important in the UCD is satisfied. The key
11 0.05 0
12 0.05 0
use case(s) will play a significant role in the performance
13 0.05 0 of any software. Therefore, the ranking or priority of the
14 0.05 0 use cases is important while making design decisions.
15 0.05 0.0526
16 0.05 0.0526 5. Conclusion and Future Work
17 0.05 0
18 0.05 0
19 0.05 0 In this paper approaches based on Page Rank algo-
rithm, weighted Page Rank algorithm and HITS algorithm
cases. We have applied Page Rank algorithm on the exam- is proposed to find and prioritize the key use case(s) of the
ple UCD shown in Figure 1. As a result, the largest value system. This approach provides information about the key
of Page Rank is for the use case (6) as observed from Ta- requirements i.e. which part of the initially unknown prob-
ble 3 (but less than the rank of actor in the UCD). Hence, lem domain should be looked at first by identifying the key
we conclude that this is the most important use case use cases in UCD. At the same time, it also gives us some
among all the use cases defined in the UCD in Figure 1. insight about the use cases or requirements getting lowest
The results are verified by application of weighted ranks. This information can be used by requirement engi-
Page Rank where variation in the weight associated with neers and software developers to make better decisions re-
extend relation is incorporated. The weight of the edge lated to the implementation of functional requirements and
connecting two use cases is taken as 1 for association and hence develop quality software. In future, we propose to
include relation whereas 0.85 for extend relation as this extend this work by applying this technique to the other re-
use case is not always called. The results are shown in quirement engineering artifacts. Further we would like to
Table 4 after applying weighted Page Rank for damping perform more experiments with large real-life systems to
values 0.85, 0.70 and 0.50. We can conclude from the re- show that the results are reliable and effectively guide soft-
sults that use case (6) is the most important use case in ware developer during early requirements analysis.
662 Sangeeta Sabharwal et al.
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Manuscript Received: Nov. 29, 2017
Accepted: Apr. 16, 2018