The Spectral Barycentre of a Set of Graphs with Community Structure

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: Meyer, François G.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Meyer, François G.
author_facet Meyer, François G.
contents The notion of barycentre graph is of crucial importance for machine learning algorithms that process graph-valued data. The barycentre graph is a "summary graph" that captures the mean topology and connectivity structure of a training dataset of graphs. The construction of a barycentre requires the definition of a metric to quantify distances between pairs of graphs. In this work, we use a multiscale spectral distance that is defined using the eigenvalues of the normalized graph Laplacian. The eigenvalues -- but not the eigenvectors -- of the normalized Laplacian of the barycentre graph can be determined from the optimization problem that defines the barycentre. In this work, we propose a structural constraint on the eigenvectors of the normalized graph Laplacian of the barycentre graph that guarantees that the barycentre inherits the topological structure of the graphs in the sample dataset. The eigenvectors can be computed using an algorithm that explores the large library of Soules bases. When the graphs are random realizations of a balanced stochastic block model, then our algorithm returns a barycentre that converges asymptotically (in the limit of large graph size) almost-surely to the population mean of the graphs. We perform Monte Carlo simulations to validate the theoretical properties of the estimator; we conduct experiments on real-life graphs that suggest that our approach works beyond the controlled environment of stochastic block models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_00038
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Spectral Barycentre of a Set of Graphs with Community Structure
Meyer, François G.
Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
The notion of barycentre graph is of crucial importance for machine learning algorithms that process graph-valued data. The barycentre graph is a "summary graph" that captures the mean topology and connectivity structure of a training dataset of graphs. The construction of a barycentre requires the definition of a metric to quantify distances between pairs of graphs. In this work, we use a multiscale spectral distance that is defined using the eigenvalues of the normalized graph Laplacian. The eigenvalues -- but not the eigenvectors -- of the normalized Laplacian of the barycentre graph can be determined from the optimization problem that defines the barycentre. In this work, we propose a structural constraint on the eigenvectors of the normalized graph Laplacian of the barycentre graph that guarantees that the barycentre inherits the topological structure of the graphs in the sample dataset. The eigenvectors can be computed using an algorithm that explores the large library of Soules bases. When the graphs are random realizations of a balanced stochastic block model, then our algorithm returns a barycentre that converges asymptotically (in the limit of large graph size) almost-surely to the population mean of the graphs. We perform Monte Carlo simulations to validate the theoretical properties of the estimator; we conduct experiments on real-life graphs that suggest that our approach works beyond the controlled environment of stochastic block models.
title The Spectral Barycentre of a Set of Graphs with Community Structure
topic Social and Information Networks
Machine Learning
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00038