Convolutional Filtering in Simplicial Complexes
This provides a method for analyzing complex network data with higher-order interactions, though it appears incremental as an extension of graph-based techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of extending convolutional filtering to data structured as simplicial complexes, which capture higher-order relationships beyond graphs, by proposing a filter bank based on Hodge-Laplacians and incidence matrices, with results including proven properties like equivariance and linear computational complexity.
This paper proposes convolutional filtering for data whose structure can be modeled by a simplicial complex (SC). SCs are mathematical tools that not only capture pairwise relationships as graphs but account also for higher-order network structures. These filters are built by following the shift-and-sum principle of the convolution operation and rely on the Hodge-Laplacians to shift the signal within the simplex. But since in SCs we have also inter-simplex coupling, we use the incidence matrices to transfer the signal in adjacent simplices and build a filter bank to jointly filter signals from different levels. We prove some interesting properties for the proposed filter bank, including permutation and orientation equivariance, a computational complexity that is linear in the SC dimension, and a spectral interpretation using the simplicial Fourier transform. We illustrate the proposed approach with numerical experiments.