Signal Processing on Directed Graphs: The Role of Edge Directionality When Processing and Learning From Network Data

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the current landscape of signal processing (SP) on directed graphs (digraphs). Directionality is inherent to many real-world (information, transportation, biological) networks, and it should play an integral role in processing and learning from network data. We thus lay out a comprehensive review of recent advances in SP on digraphs, offering insights through comparisons with results available for undirected graphs, discussing emerging directions, establishing links with related areas in machine learning and causal inference in statistics as well as illustrating their practical relevance to timely applications. To this end, we begin by surveying (orthonormal) signal representations and their graph-frequency interpretations based on novel measurements of signal variation for digraphs. We then move on to filtering, a central component in deriving a comprehensive theory of SP on digraphs. Indeed, through the lens of filter-based generative signal models, we explore a unified framework to study inverse problems (e.g., sampling and deconvolution on networks), the statistical analysis of random signals, and the topology inference of digraphs from nodal observations.