Identifying the Topology of Undirected Networks from Diffused Non-stationary Graph Signals

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to infer undirected network topologies from non-stationary diffused signals by estimating the graph shift operator's eigenvectors and eigenvalues, even with limited input information.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to identify graph structures from non-stationary signals, including cases with only second-order statistics, and proposes algorithms with performance analysis.

Findings

Effective topology recovery in brain, social, financial, and transportation networks.

Algorithms successfully estimate graph eigenstructure from diffused signals.

Method handles both linear and quadratic input relations.

Abstract

We address the problem of inferring an undirected graph from nodal observations, which are modeled as non-stationary graph signals generated by local diffusion dynamics that depend on the structure of the unknown network. Using the so-called graph-shift operator (GSO), which is a matrix representation of the graph, we first identify the eigenvectors of the shift matrix from realizations of the diffused signals, and then estimate the eigenvalues by imposing desirable properties on the graph to be recovered. Different from the stationary setting where the eigenvectors can be obtained directly from the covariance matrix of the observations, here we need to estimate first the unknown diffusion (graph) filter -- a polynomial in the GSO that preserves the sought eigenbasis. To carry out this initial system identification step, we exploit different sources of information on the arbitrarily-correlated input signal driving the diffusion on the graph. We first explore the simpler case where the observations, the input information, and the unknown graph filter are linearly related. We then address the case where the relation is given by a system of matrix quadratic equations, which arises in pragmatic scenarios where only the second-order statistics of the inputs are available. While such quadratic filter identification problem boils down to a non-convex fourth-order polynomial minimization, we discuss identifiability conditions, propose algorithms to approximate the solution and analyze their performance. Numerical tests illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed topology inference algorithms in recovering brain, social, financial and urban transportation networks using synthetic and real-world signals.