Stationary Graph Processes and Spectral Estimation

Abstract

Stationarity is a cornerstone property that facilitates the analysis and processing of random signals in the time domain. Although time-varying signals are abundant in nature, in many practical scenarios, the information of interest resides in more irregular graph domains. This lack of regularity hampers the generalization of the classical notion of stationarity to graph signals. This paper proposes a definition of weak stationarity for random graph signals that takes into account the structure of the graph where the random process takes place, while inheriting many of the meaningful properties of the classical time domain definition. Provided that the topology of the graph can be described by a normal matrix, stationary graph processes can be modeled as the output of a linear graph filter applied to a white input. This is shown equivalent to requiring the correlation matrix to be diagonalized by the graph Fourier transform; a fact that is leveraged to define a notion of power spectral density (PSD). Properties of the graph PSD are analyzed and a number of methods for its estimation are proposed. This includes generalizations of nonparametric approaches such as periodograms, window-based average periodograms, and filter banks, as well as parametric approaches, using moving-average, autoregressive, and ARMA processes. Graph stationarity and graph PSD estimation are investigated numerically for synthetic and real-world graph signals.