skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Metrics of graph Laplacian eigenvectors
The application of graph Laplacian eigenvectors has been quite popular in the graph signal processing field: one can use them as ingredients to design smooth multiscale basis. Our long-term goal is to study and understand the dual geometry of graph Laplacian eigenvectors. In order to do that, it is necessary to define a certain metric to measure the behavioral differences between each pair of the eigenvectors. Saito (2018) considered the ramified optimal transportation (ROT) cost between the square of the eigenvectors as such a metric. Clonginger and Steinerberger (2018) proposed a way to measure the affinity (or `similarity') between the eigenvectors based on their Hadamard (HAD) product. In this article, we propose a simplified ROT metric that is more computational efficient and introduce two more ways to define the distance between the eigenvectors, i.e., the time-stepping diffusion (TSD) metric and the difference of absolute gradient (DAG) pseudometric. The TSD metric measures the cost of "flattening" the initial graph signal via diffusion process up to certain time, hence it can be viewed as a time-dependent version of the ROT metric. The DAG pseudometric is the l2-distance between the feature vectors derived from the eigenvectors, in particular, the absolute gradients of the eigenvectors. We then compare the performance of ROT, HAD and the two new "metrics: on different kinds of graphs. Finally, we investigate their relationship as well as their pros and cons. Keywords: Graph Laplacian eigenvectors, metrics between orthonormal vectors, dual geometry of graph Laplacian eigenvectors, multiscale basis dictionaries on graphs, heat diffusion on graphs, Wasserstein distance, optimal transport  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1912747
PAR ID:
10164284
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Wavelets and Sparsity XVIII
Volume:
11138
Page Range / eLocation ID:
111381K
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    Abstract We introduce a set of novel multiscale basis transforms for signals on graphs that utilize their “dual” domains by incorporating the “natural” distances between graph Laplacian eigenvectors, rather than simply using the eigenvalue ordering. These basis dictionaries can be seen as generalizations of the classical Shannon wavelet packet dictionary to arbitrary graphs, and do not rely on the frequency interpretation of Laplacian eigenvalues. We describe the algorithms (involving either vector rotations or orthogonalizations) to construct these basis dictionaries, use them to efficiently approximate graph signals through the best basis search, and demonstrate the strengths of these basis dictionaries for graph signals measured on sunflower graphs and street networks. 
    more » « less
  2. We introduce SignNet and BasisNet---new neural architectures that are invariant to two key symmetries displayed by eigenvectors: (i) sign flips, since if v is an eigenvector then so is -v; and (ii) more general basis symmetries, which occur in higher dimensional eigenspaces with infinitely many choices of basis eigenvectors. We prove that under certain conditions our networks are universal, i.e., they can approximate any continuous function of eigenvectors with the desired invariances. When used with Laplacian eigenvectors, our networks are provably more expressive than existing spectral methods on graphs; for instance, they subsume all spectral graph convolutions, certain spectral graph invariants, and previously proposed graph positional encodings as special cases. Experiments show that our networks significantly outperform existing baselines on molecular graph regression, learning expressive graph representations, and learning neural fields on triangle meshes. Our code is available at https://github.com/cptq/SignNet-BasisNet. 
    more » « less
  3. Banerjee, Arindam; Zhou, Zhi-Hua (Ed.)
    To characterize the location (mean, median) of a set of graphs, one needs a notion of centrality that is adapted to metric spaces, since graph sets are not Euclidean spaces. A standard approach is to consider the Fr ́echet mean. In this work, we equip a set of graph with the pseudometric defined by the l2 norm between the eigenvalues of their respective adjacency matrix. Unlike the edit distance, this pseudometric reveals structural changes at multiple scales, and is well adapted to studying various statistical problems for graph-valued data. We describe an algorithm to compute an approximation to the sample Fr ́echet mean of a set of undirected unweighted graphs with a fixed size using this pseudometric. 
    more » « less
  4. Oliva, Gabriele (Ed.)
    We define a new family of similarity and distance measures on graphs, and explore their theoretical properties in comparison to conventional distance metrics. These measures are defined by the solution(s) to an optimization problem which attempts find a map minimizing the discrepancy between two graph Laplacian exponential matrices, under norm-preserving and sparsity constraints. Variants of the distance metric are introduced to consider such optimized maps under sparsity constraints as well as fixed time-scaling between the two Laplacians. The objective function of this optimization is multimodal and has discontinuous slope, and is hence difficult for univariate optimizers to solve. We demonstrate a novel procedure for efficiently calculating these optima for two of our distance measure variants. We present numerical experiments demonstrating that (a) upper bounds of our distance metrics can be used to distinguish between lineages of related graphs; (b) our procedure is faster at finding the required optima, by as much as a factor of 10 3 ; and (c) the upper bounds satisfy the triangle inequality exactly under some assumptions and approximately under others. We also derive an upper bound for the distance between two graph products, in terms of the distance between the two pairs of factors. Additionally, we present several possible applications, including the construction of infinite “graph limits” by means of Cauchy sequences of graphs related to one another by our distance measure. 
    more » « less
  5. Recent spectral graph sparsificationresearch aims to construct ultra-sparse subgraphs for preserving the original graph spectral (structural) properties, such as the first few Laplacian eigenvalues and eigenvectors, which has led to the development of a variety of nearly linear time numerical and graph algorithms. However, there is very limited progress in the spectral sparsification of directed graphs. In this work, we prove the existence of nearly linear-sized spectral sparsifiers for directed graphs under certain conditions. Furthermore, we introduce a practically efficient spectral algorithm (diGRASS) for sparsifying real-world, large-scale directed graphs leveraging spectral matrix perturbation analysis. The proposed method has been evaluated using a variety of directed graphs obtained from real-world applications, showing promising results for solving directed graph Laplacians, spectral partitioning of directed graphs, and approximately computing (personalized) PageRank vectors. 
    more » « less