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Hypergraphs capture multi-way relationships in data, and they have consequently seen a number of applications in higher-order network analysis, computer vision, geometry processing, and machine learning. In this paper, we develop theoretical foundations for studying the space of hypergraphs using ingredients from optimal transport. By enriching a hypergraph with probability measures on its nodes and hyperedges, as well as relational information capturing local and global structures, we obtain a general and robust framework for studying the collection of all hypergraphs. First, we introduce a hypergraph distance based on the co-optimal transport framework of Redko et al. and study its theoretical properties. Second, we formalize common methods for transforming a hypergraph into a graph as maps between the space of hypergraphs and the space of graphs, and study their functorial properties and Lipschitz bounds. Finally, we demonstrate the versatility of our Hypergraph Co-Optimal Transport (HyperCOT) framework through various examples. 

Abstract We define a metric—the network Gromov–Wasserstein distance—on weighted, directed networks that is sensitive to the presence of outliers. In addition to proving its theoretical properties, we supply network invariants based on optimal transport that approximate this distance by means of lower bounds. We test these methods on a range of simulated network datasets and on a dataset of real-world global bilateral migration. For our simulations, we define a network generative model based on the stochastic block model. This may be of independent interest for benchmarking purposes.