Structure from Voltage

Abstract

Effective resistance (ER) is an attractive way to interrogate the structure of graphs. It is an alternative to computing the eigen-vectors of the graph Laplacian. Graph laplacians are used to find low dimensional structures in high dimensional data. Here too, ER based analysis has advantages over eign-vector based methods. Unfortunately Von Luxburg et al. (2010) show that, when vertices correspond to a sample from a distribution over a metric space, the limit of the ER between distant points converges to a trivial quantity that holds no information about the structure of the graph. We show that by using scaling resistances in a graph with $n$ vertices by $n^2$, one gets a meaningful limit of the voltages and of effective resistances. We also show that by adding a "ground" node to a metric graph one gets a simple and natural way to compute all of the distances from a chosen point to all other points.