999 research outputs found
Average resistance of toroidal graphs
The average effective resistance of a graph is a relevant performance index
in many applications, including distributed estimation and control of network
systems. In this paper, we study how the average resistance depends on the
graph topology and specifically on the dimension of the graph. We concentrate
on -dimensional toroidal grids and we exploit the connection between
resistance and Laplacian eigenvalues. Our analysis provides tight estimates of
the average resistance, which are key to study its asymptotic behavior when the
number of nodes grows to infinity. In dimension two, the average resistance
diverges: in this case, we are able to capture its rate of growth when the
sides of the grid grow at different rates. In higher dimensions, the average
resistance is bounded uniformly in the number of nodes: in this case, we
conjecture that its value is of order for large . We prove this fact
for hypercubes and when the side lengths go to infinity.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures, to appear in SIAM Journal on Control and
Optimization (SICON
Developments in the theory of randomized shortest paths with a comparison of graph node distances
There have lately been several suggestions for parametrized distances on a
graph that generalize the shortest path distance and the commute time or
resistance distance. The need for developing such distances has risen from the
observation that the above-mentioned common distances in many situations fail
to take into account the global structure of the graph. In this article, we
develop the theory of one family of graph node distances, known as the
randomized shortest path dissimilarity, which has its foundation in statistical
physics. We show that the randomized shortest path dissimilarity can be easily
computed in closed form for all pairs of nodes of a graph. Moreover, we come up
with a new definition of a distance measure that we call the free energy
distance. The free energy distance can be seen as an upgrade of the randomized
shortest path dissimilarity as it defines a metric, in addition to which it
satisfies the graph-geodetic property. The derivation and computation of the
free energy distance are also straightforward. We then make a comparison
between a set of generalized distances that interpolate between the shortest
path distance and the commute time, or resistance distance. This comparison
focuses on the applicability of the distances in graph node clustering and
classification. The comparison, in general, shows that the parametrized
distances perform well in the tasks. In particular, we see that the results
obtained with the free energy distance are among the best in all the
experiments.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures, 3 table
Pooling or sampling: Collective dynamics for electrical flow estimation
The computation of electrical flows is a crucial primitive for many recently proposed optimization algorithms on weighted networks. While typically implemented as a centralized subroutine, the ability to perform this task in a fully decentralized way is implicit in a number of biological systems. Thus, a natural question is whether this task can provably be accomplished in an efficient way by a network of agents executing a simple protocol. We provide a positive answer, proposing two distributed approaches to electrical flow computation on a weighted network: a deterministic process mimicking Jacobi's iterative method for solving linear systems, and a randomized token diffusion process, based on revisiting a classical random walk process on a graph with an absorbing node. We show that both processes converge to a solution of Kirchhoff's node potential equations, derive bounds on their convergence rates in terms of the weights of the network, and analyze their time and message complexity
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