Efficient Directed Graph Sampling via Gershgorin Disc Alignment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel sampling scheme for directed graphs that improves signal reconstruction accuracy and speed by leveraging Gershgorin disc alignment, addressing a gap in existing undirected graph sampling methods.

Contribution

The paper develops the first directed graph sampling method based on Gershgorin disc alignment, optimizing eigenvalue bounds to enhance reconstruction fidelity.

Findings

Achieves smaller reconstruction errors than competing methods.

Operates faster while maintaining high fidelity.

Effectively handles directed graph structures.

Abstract

Graph sampling is the problem of choosing a node subset via sampling matrix $\mathbf{H} \in \{0,1\}^{K \times N}$ to collect samples $\mathbf{y} = \mathbf{H} \mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^K$, $K < N$, so that the target signal $\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^N$ can be reconstructed in high fidelity. While sampling on undirected graphs is well studied, we propose the first sampling scheme tailored specifically for directed graphs, leveraging a previous undirected graph sampling method based on Gershgorin disc alignment (GDAS). Concretely, given a directed positive graph $\mathcal{G}^d$ specified by random-walk graph Laplacian matrix $\mathbf{L}_{rw}$, we first define reconstruction of a smooth signal $\mathbf{x}^*$ from samples $\mathbf{y}$ using graph shift variation (GSV) $\|\mathbf{L}_{rw} \mathbf{x}\|^2_2$ as a signal prior. To minimize worst-case reconstruction error of the linear system solution $\mathbf{x}^* = \mathbf{C}^{-1} \mathbf{H}^\top \mathbf{y}$ with symmetric coefficient matrix $\mathbf{C} = \mathbf{H}^\top \mathbf{H} + \mu \mathbf{L}_{rw}^\top \mathbf{L}_{rw}$, the sampling objective is to choose $\mathbf{H}$ to maximize the smallest eigenvalue $\lambda_{\min}(\mathbf{C})$ of $\mathbf{C}$. To circumvent eigen-decomposition entirely, we maximize instead a lower bound $\lambda^-_{\min}(\mathbf{S}\mathbf{C}\mathbf{S}^{-1})$ of $\lambda_{\min}(\mathbf{C})$ -- smallest Gershgorin disc left-end of a similarity transform of $\mathbf{C}$ -- via a variant of GDAS based on Gershgorin circle theorem (GCT). Experimental results show that our sampling method yields smaller signal reconstruction errors at a faster speed compared to competing schemes.