Subgraph Signal Processing

Abstract: Graph signal processing, like the graph Fourier transform, requires the full graph signal at every vertex of the graph. However, in practice, only signals at a subset of vertices may be available. We propose a subgraph signal processing framework that relates a graph shift operator or filter on a subgraph with a filter on the ambient graph through an operator loss. It allows us to define shift operators for the subgraph signal, which has a meaningful interpretation and relation to mixtures of shift invariant filters restricted to different subgraphs of the ambient graph (which we call semi shift invariant). This leads to a notion of frequency domain for the subgraph signal consistent in some sense with that of the full graph signal. We apply the subgraph signal processing machinery to several applications and demonstrate the utility of this framework in cases where only partial graph signals are observed.