A Note on Diffusion State Distance

Abstract

Diffusion state distance (DSD) is a metric on the vertices of a graph, motivated by bioinformatic modeling. Previous results on the convergence of DSD to a limiting metric relied on the definition being based on symmetric or reversible random walk on the graph. We show that convergence holds even when the DSD is based on general finite irreducible Markov chains. The proofs rely on classical potential theory of Kemeny and Snell.