In
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
, the graph Fourier transform is a
mathematical transform which
eigendecomposes the
Laplacian matrix
In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Laplacian matrix, also called the graph Laplacian, admittance matrix, Kirchhoff matrix or discrete Laplacian, is a matrix representation of a graph. Named after Pierre-Simon Laplace, the graph Laplac ...
of a graph into
eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Analogously to the
classical Fourier Transform, the eigenvalues represent
frequencies
Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is also occasionally referred to as ''temporal frequency'' for clarity, and is distinct from ''angular frequency''. Frequency is measured in hertz (Hz) which is eq ...
and eigenvectors form what is known as a graph
Fourier basis
In mathematics, a basis function is an element of a particular basis for a function space. Every function in the function space can be represented as a linear combination of basis functions, just as every vector in a vector space can be repres ...
.
The Graph Fourier transform is important in
spectral graph theory
In mathematics, spectral graph theory is the study of the properties of a graph in relationship to the characteristic polynomial, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors of matrices associated with the graph, such as its adjacency matrix or Laplacian matrix ...
. It is widely applied in the recent study of graph structured
learning algorithms
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
, such as the widely employed
convolutional networks.
Definition
Given an
undirected
In discrete mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a graph is a structure amounting to a set of objects in which some pairs of the objects are in some sense "related". The objects correspond to mathematical abstractions called '' v ...
weighted graph , where
is the set of nodes with
(
being the number of nodes) and
is the set of edges, a graph signal
is a function defined on the vertices of the graph
. The signal
maps every vertex
to a
real number
In mathematics, a real number is a number that can be used to measure a ''continuous'' one-dimensional quantity such as a distance, duration or temperature. Here, ''continuous'' means that values can have arbitrarily small variations. Every real ...
. Any graph signal can be projected on the
eigenvectors of the
Laplacian matrix
In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Laplacian matrix, also called the graph Laplacian, admittance matrix, Kirchhoff matrix or discrete Laplacian, is a matrix representation of a graph. Named after Pierre-Simon Laplace, the graph Laplac ...
.
Let
and
be the
eigenvalue and eigenvector of the
Laplacian
In mathematics, the Laplace operator or Laplacian is a differential operator given by the divergence of the gradient of a scalar function on Euclidean space. It is usually denoted by the symbols \nabla\cdot\nabla, \nabla^2 (where \nabla is the ...
matrix
(the eigenvalues are sorted in an increasing order, i.e.,
), the graph Fourier transform (GFT)
of a graph signal
on the vertices of
is the expansion of
in terms of the
eigenfunctions of
.
It is defined as:
:
where
.
Since
is a
real symmetric matrix, its eigenvectors
form an
orthogonal basis In mathematics, particularly linear algebra, an orthogonal basis for an inner product space V is a basis for V whose vectors are mutually orthogonal. If the vectors of an orthogonal basis are normalized, the resulting basis is an orthonormal basis ...
. Hence an inverse graph Fourier transform (IGFT) exists, and it is written as:
:
Analogously to the classical
Fourier transform
A Fourier transform (FT) is a mathematical transform that decomposes functions into frequency components, which are represented by the output of the transform as a function of frequency. Most commonly functions of time or space are transformed, ...
, graph Fourier transform provides a way to represent a signal in two different domains: the vertex domain and the
graph spectral domain. Note that the definition of the graph Fourier transform and its inverse depend on the choice of Laplacian eigenvectors, which are not necessarily unique.
The eigenvectors of the normalized Laplacian matrix are also a possible base to define the forward and inverse graph Fourier transform.
Properties
Parseval's identity
The
Parseval relation holds for the graph Fourier transform, that is, for any
:
This gives us
Parseval's identity In mathematical analysis, Parseval's identity, named after Marc-Antoine Parseval, is a fundamental result on the summability of the Fourier series of a function. Geometrically, it is a generalized Pythagorean theorem for inner-product spaces (which ...
:
:
Generalized convolution operator
The definition of
convolution
In mathematics (in particular, functional analysis), convolution is a operation (mathematics), mathematical operation on two function (mathematics), functions ( and ) that produces a third function (f*g) that expresses how the shape of one is ...
between two functions
and
cannot be directly applied to graph signals, because the
signal translation is not defined in the context of graphs.
However, by replacing the complex
exponential shift in classical Fourier transform with the graph Laplacian eigenvectors, convolution of two graph signals can be defined as:
:
:
Properties of the convolution operator
The generalized convolution operator satisfies the following properties:
* Generalized convolution in the vertex domain is multiplication in the graph spectral domain:
*
Commutativity
In mathematics, a binary operation is commutative if changing the order of the operands does not change the result. It is a fundamental property of many binary operations, and many mathematical proofs depend on it. Most familiar as the name of ...
is an identity for the generalized convolution operator.
* The sum of the generalized convolution of two signals is a constant times the product of the sums of the two signals:
:
cannot be generalized to the graph setting. One way to define a generalized translation operator is through generalized convolution with a delta function centered at vertex
is a common approach to data compression. As graph signals can be sparse in their graph spectral domain, the graph Fourier transform can also be used for
.
based on the graph Fourier transform can be designed for graph signal denoising.
As the graph Fourier transform enables the definition of convolution on graphs, it makes possible to adapt the conventional
to work on graphs. Graph structured
(GCN), are able to propagate the labels of a graph signal throughout the graph with a small subset of labelled nodes, theoretically operating as a first order approximation of spectral graph convolutions without computing the graph Laplacian and its eigendecomposition.
of graphs, including the graph Fourier transform. It supports both
languages.