Random Walks on Simplicial Complexes and Harmonics

Sayan Mukherjee, John Steenbergen

Published 2013-10-18Version 1

In this paper, we introduce random walks with absorbing states on simplicial complexes. Given a simplicial complex of dimension $d$, a random walk with an absorbing state is defined which relates to the spectrum of the $k$-dimensional Laplacian for $1 \leq k \leq d$ and which relates to the local random walk on a graph defined by Fan Chung. We also examine an application of random walks on simplicial complexes to a semi-supervised learning problem. Specifically, we consider a label propagation algorithm on oriented edges, which applies to a generalization of the partially labelled classification problem on graphs.