An Averaging Processes on Hypergraphs

Abstract

Consider the following iterated process on a hypergraph $H$. Each vertex $v$ has an initial vertex weight. At each step, we uniformly at random select an edge $F$ in $H$, and for each vertex $v$ in $F$ we replace the weight of $v$ by the average value of the vertex weights over all vertices in $F$. This is a generalization of an interactive process on graphs, first proposed by Aldous and Lanoue. In this paper, we use the eigenvalues of a Laplacian for hypergraphs to bound the rate of convergence for the iterated averaging process.