We give a probabilistic interpretation of sampling theory of graph signals.
To do this, we first define a generative model for the data using a pairwise
Gaussian random field (GRF) which depends on the graph. We show that, under
certain conditions, reconstructing a graph signal from a subset of its samples
by least squares is equivalent to performing MAP inference on an approximation
of this GRF which has a low rank covariance matrix. We then show that a
sampling set of given size with the largest associated cut-off frequency, which
is optimal from a sampling theoretic point of view, minimizes the worst case
predictive covariance of the MAP estimate on the GRF. This interpretation also
gives an intuitive explanation for the superior performance of the sampling
theoretic approach to active semi-supervised classification.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, To appear in International Conference on
Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 201