Distance plays a fundamental role in measuring similarity between objects. Various visualization techniques and learning tasks in statistics and machine learning such as shape matching, classification, dimension reduction and clustering often rely on some distance or similarity measure. It is of tremendous importance to have a distance that can incorporate the underlying structure of the object. In this paper, we focus on proposing such a distance between network objects. Our key insight is to define a distance based on the long term diffusion behavior of the whole network. We first introduce a dynamic system on graphs called Laplacian flow. Based on this Laplacian flow, a new version of diffusion distance between networks is proposed. We will demonstrate the utility of the distance and its advantage over various existing distances through explicit examples. The distance is also applied to subsequent learning tasks such as clustering network objects.
@cite_6: Let @math be a compact Riemannian submanifold of @math of dimension @math and let @math be a sample of i.i.d. points in @math with uniform distribution. We study the random operators @math where @math is the Gaussian kernel and @math as @math Such operators can be viewed as graph laplacians (for a weighted graph with vertices at data points) and they have been used in the machine learning literature to approximate the Laplace-Beltrami operator of @math @math (divided by the Riemannian volume of the manifold). We prove several results on a.s. and distributional convergence of the deviations @math for smooth functions @math both pointwise and uniformly in @math and @math (here @math and @math is the Riemannian volume measure). In particular, we show that for any class @math of three times differentiable functions on @math with uniformly bounded derivatives @math as soon as @math and also prove asymptotic normality of @math (functional CLT) for a fixed @math and uniformly in @math
The graph Laplacian has been known as an approximation of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on smooth manifold underlying observed objects @cite_6 . Since @math contains geometric and topological information of the data via its spectrum, many strategies have been proposed.