arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Optimal Transport for Network Comparison: A Review with Machine Learning Applications

The paper reviews the use of optimal transport for comparing undirected, unweighted graphs, focusing on three main distances: Wasserstein, Gromov-Wasserstein, and Bures-Wasserstein. It discusses closed-form solutions for the Wasserstein distance in one dimension, how transport plans identify influential nodes after perturbations, and derives spectral bounds for the Bures-Wasserstein distance to avoid full decompositions. The authors evaluate these distances on synthetic clustering data and a real-world time‑series network for anomaly detection.

By James Hyun, Fran\c{c}ois G. Meyer