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On the Properties of Gromov Matrices and their Applications in Network Inference
The spanning tree heuristic is a commonly adopted procedure in network
inference and estimation. It allows one to generalize an inference method
developed for trees, which is usually based on a statistically rigorous
approach, to a heuristic procedure for general graphs by (usually randomly)
choosing a spanning tree in the graph to apply the approach developed for
trees. However, there are an intractable number of spanning trees in a dense
graph. In this paper, we represent a weighted tree with a matrix, which we call
a Gromov matrix. We propose a method that constructs a family of Gromov
matrices using convex combinations, which can be used for inference and
estimation instead of a randomly selected spanning tree. This procedure
increases the size of the candidate set and hence enhances the performance of
the classical spanning tree heuristic. On the other hand, our new scheme is
based on simple algebraic constructions using matrices, and hence is still
computationally tractable. We discuss some applications on network inference
and estimation to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method