On The Complexity of Sparse Label Propagation

Abstract

This paper investigates the computational complexity of sparse label propagation which has been proposed recently for processing network structured data. Sparse label propagation amounts to a convex optimization problem and might be considered as an extension of basis pursuit from sparse vectors to network structured datasets. Using a standard first-order oracle model, we characterize the number of iterations for sparse label propagation to achieve a prescribed accuracy. In particular, we derive an upper bound on the number of iterations required to achieve a certain accuracy and show that this upper bound is sharp for datasets having a chain structure (e.g., time series).