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_13: Two central limit theorems for sample Fr 'echet means are derived, both significant for nonparametric inference on non-Euclidean spaces. The first one, Theorem 2.2, encompasses and improves upon most earlier CLTs on Fr 'echet means and broadens the scope of the methodology beyond manifolds to diverse new non-Euclidean data including those on certain stratified spaces which are important in the study of phylogenetic trees. It does not require that the underlying distribution @math have a density, and applies to both intrinsic and extrinsic analysis. The second theorem, Theorem 3.3, focuses on intrinsic means on Riemannian manifolds of dimensions @math and breaks new ground by providing a broad CLT without any of the earlier restrictive support assumptions. It makes the statistically reasonable assumption of a somewhat smooth density of @math . The excluded case of dimension @math proves to be an enigma, although the first theorem does provide a CLT in this case as well under a support restriction. Theorem 3.3 immediately applies to spheres @math , @math , which are also of considerable importance in applications to axial spaces and to landmarks based image analysis, as these spaces are quotients of spheres under a Lie group @math of isometries of @math .
@cite_1: We formalize a notion of topological simplification within the framework of a filtration, which is the history of a growing complex. We classify a topological change that happens during growth as either a feature or noise, depending on its life-time or persistence within the filtration. We give fast algorithms for completing persistence and experimental evidence for their speed and utility.
Recently, an interesting work adopted diffusion dynamics on a graph to characterize and distinguish networks. The work is based on the manifold learning method called Diffusion Maps @cite_1 , where the distance between two nodes takes all possible paths in between into account across different timescale. This implies that each network and its topological properties can be well presented by the diffusion process. In @cite_13 , adopted such idea to define graph diffusion distance that measures dissimilarity of two networks and showed it is indeed a metric.