Graph Bispectrum for Nonlinear Mode Interactions

Abstract

We introduce a graph bispectrum formulation for characterizing higher-order interactions in graph signals. While conventional graph spectral methods capture only second-order structure, many graph signals exhibit nonlinear interactions that are not reflected in covariance or graph power spectra. Motivated by classical higher-order spectral analysis, we define a graph bispectrum tensor based on third-order moments of graph Fourier coefficients and derive a compact graph bicoherence measure that summarizes nonlinear mode interactions in a low-dimensional and scale-invariant form. We establish key properties of the proposed quantities, including vanishing third-order moments for Gaussian graph signals and a dynamical interpretation in terms of nonlinear mode coupling. Experiments on synthetic random graph signals demonstrate that the proposed measures detect complementary nonlinear dependencies even when second-order statistics are similar. We further apply the method to EEG recordings from the CHB-MIT Scalp EEG Database and show that ictal activity exhibits substantially increased nonlinear graph spectral coupling compared to interictal periods. The proposed approach provides an interpretable and computationally efficient tool for higher-order interaction analysis for graph signals.