Statistical Testing on Directed Graphs by Surrogate Data Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chan, Chun Hei Michael, Cionca, Alexandre, Van De Ville, Dimitri
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Chan, Chun Hei Michael
Cionca, Alexandre
Van De Ville, Dimitri
author_facet Chan, Chun Hei Michael
Cionca, Alexandre
Van De Ville, Dimitri
contents In recent years, graph signal processing has emerged as a powerful framework at the intersection of signal processing and graph theory, providing tools for the analysis of signals defined on nodes while accounting for their relationships represented by edges. These tools have been successfully applied to various settings, including statistical hypothesis testing. In particular, non-parametric approaches based on surrogate generation have been proposed for signals on undirected graphs. However, they are yet to be extended to directed graphs. In this work, we first revisit the notion of stationary graph signals on directed graphs. Specifically, and through the eigendecomposition of the graph shift operator, we define directed graph wide-sense stationary signals. Then, we propose a new framework to generate surrogate graph signals that preserve covariance structure under stationarity assumptions. Null distributions of the test metric can then be constructed from these surrogates and serve as a reference for the empirical data. Finally, we provide guiding examples and an application on real data, in which we compare the performance of our framework with existing techniques for undirected graphs or based on naive permutation, demonstrating feasibility and superiority of the proposed approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00758
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Statistical Testing on Directed Graphs by Surrogate Data Generation
Chan, Chun Hei Michael
Cionca, Alexandre
Van De Ville, Dimitri
Machine Learning
Signal Processing
Methodology
In recent years, graph signal processing has emerged as a powerful framework at the intersection of signal processing and graph theory, providing tools for the analysis of signals defined on nodes while accounting for their relationships represented by edges. These tools have been successfully applied to various settings, including statistical hypothesis testing. In particular, non-parametric approaches based on surrogate generation have been proposed for signals on undirected graphs. However, they are yet to be extended to directed graphs. In this work, we first revisit the notion of stationary graph signals on directed graphs. Specifically, and through the eigendecomposition of the graph shift operator, we define directed graph wide-sense stationary signals. Then, we propose a new framework to generate surrogate graph signals that preserve covariance structure under stationarity assumptions. Null distributions of the test metric can then be constructed from these surrogates and serve as a reference for the empirical data. Finally, we provide guiding examples and an application on real data, in which we compare the performance of our framework with existing techniques for undirected graphs or based on naive permutation, demonstrating feasibility and superiority of the proposed approach.
title Statistical Testing on Directed Graphs by Surrogate Data Generation
topic Machine Learning
Signal Processing
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00758