Optimal Transport for Network Comparison: A Unified Review with New Spectral Bounds and Machine Learning Applications
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
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.
arXiv:2203. 04711v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a framework for embedding graph structured data into a vector space, taking into account node features and topology of a graph into the optimal transport (OT) problem.
The paper introduces LOT Wassmap, an algorithm designed to uncover low‑dimensional structures in the Wasserstein space without computing a full pairwise distance matrix. It leverages approximation schemes such as Sinkhorn distances and linearized optimal transport to accelerate computations, and provides theoretical guarantees on embedding quality even when only finite samples are available. Experiments show that LOT Wassmap achieves accurate embeddings that improve with larger sample sizes while significantly reducing computational cost compared to traditional pairwise‑distance‑based methods.
arXiv:2605. 14981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Gromov--Wasserstein (GW) distances compare graphs, shapes, and point clouds through internal distances, without requiring a common coordinate system.
arXiv:2606. 02047v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Convex Distance Operator Transport (CDOT), the first convex optimal transport framework that aligns distributions across heterogeneous domains by jointly preserving feature correspondence and intrinsic geometric structure.
arXiv:2607. 06646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces Diffusion Semi-Relaxed Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (DsrFGW), a novel method for graph comparison that unifies node features and structural connectivity through optimal transport.