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Abstract In order to better understand manifold neural networks (MNNs), we introduce Manifold Filter-Combine Networks (MFCNs). Our filter-combine framework parallels the popular aggregate-combine paradigm for graph neural networks (GNNs) and naturally suggests many interesting families of MNNs which can be interpreted as manifold analogues of various popular GNNs. We propose a method for implementing MFCNs on high-dimensional point clouds that relies on approximating an underlying manifold by a sparse graph. We then prove that our method is consistent in the sense that it converges to a continuum limit as the number of data points tends to infinity, and we numerically demonstrate its effectiveness on real-world and synthetic data sets. 

The scattering transform is a multilayered, wavelet-based transform initially introduced as a mathematical model of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that has played a foundational role in our understanding of these networks’ stability and invariance properties. In subsequent years, there has been widespread interest in extending the success of CNNs to data sets with non- Euclidean structure, such as graphs and manifolds, leading to the emerging field of geometric deep learning. In order to improve our understanding of the architectures used in this new field, several papers have proposed generalizations of the scattering transform for non-Euclidean data structures such as undirected graphs and compact Riemannian manifolds without boundary. Analogous to the original scattering transform, these works prove that these variants of the scattering transform have desirable stability and invariance properties and aim to improve our understanding of the neural networks used in geometric deep learning. In this paper, we introduce a general, unified model for geometric scattering on measure spaces. Our proposed framework includes previous work on compact Riemannian manifolds without boundary and undirected graphs as special cases but also applies to more general settings such as directed graphs, signed graphs, and manifolds with boundary. We propose a new criterion that identifies to which groups a useful representation should be invariant and show that this criterion is sufficient to guarantee that the scattering transform has desirable stability and invariance properties. Additionally, we consider finite measure spaces that are obtained from randomly sampling an unknown manifold. We propose two methods for constructing a data-driven graph on which the associated graph scattering transform approximates the scattering transform on the underlying manifold. Moreover, we use a diffusion-maps based approach to prove quantitative estimates on the rate of convergence of one of these approximations as the number of sample points tends to infinity. Lastly, we showcase the utility of our method on spherical images, a directed graph stochastic block model, and on high-dimensional single-cell data.