Electrical Networks with Prescribed Current and Applications to Random Walks on Graphs

Abstract

We study the inverse problem of determining the conductivity matrix of an electrical network from the prescribed knowledge of the magnitude of the induced current along the edges coupled with the imposed voltage or injected current on the boundary nodes. This problem leads to a weighted $l^1$ minimization problem for the corresponding voltage potential. We also investigate the problem of determining the transition probabilities of random walks on graphs from the prescribed net number of times the walker passes along the edges of the graph. We also show that a mass preserving flow $J=(J_{i.j})$ on a network can be uniquely recovered from the knowledge of $|J|=(|J_{i,j}|)$ and the flux of the flow on the boundary nodes, where $J_{i,j}$ is the flow from node $i$ to node $j$ and $J_{i,j}=-J_{j,i}$. Convergent numerical algorithms for solving such problems are also presented.