Networks and network processes have emerged as powerful tools for modeling social interactions, disease propagation, and a variety of additional dynamics driven by relational structures. Recently, neural networks have been generalized to process data on graphs, thus being able to learn from the aforementioned network processes achieving cutting-edge performance in traditional tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, these methods have all been formulated in a way suited only to data on the nodes of a graph. The application of these techniques to data supported on the edges of a graph, namely flow signals, has not been explored in detail. To bridge this gap, we propose the use of the so-called Hodge Laplacian combined with graph neural network architectures for the analysis of flow data. Specifically, we apply two graph neural network architectures to solve the problems of flow interpolation and source localization.
We study the blind centrality ranking problem, where our goal is to infer the eigenvector centrality ranking of nodes solely from nodal observations, i.e., without information about the topology of the network. We formalize these nodal observations as graph signals and model them as the outputs of a network process on the underlying (unobserved) network. A simple spectral algorithm is proposed to estimate the leading eigenvector of the associated adjacency matrix, thus serving as a proxy for the centrality ranking. A finite rate performance analysis of the algorithm is provided, where we find a lower bound on the number of graph signals needed to correctly rank (with high probability) two nodes of interest. We then specialize our general analysis for the particular case of dense Erdős-Rényi graphs, where existing graph-theoretical results can be leveraged. Finally, we illustrate the proposed algorithm via numerical experiments in synthetic and real-world networks, making special emphasis on how the network features influence the performance.
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