Laplacian matrix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplacian_matrix
In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Laplacian matrix, sometimes called admittance matrix, Kirchhoff matrix or discrete Laplacian, is a matrixrepresentation of a graph. The Laplacian matrix can be used to find many useful properties of graph. Together with Kirchhoff's theorem, it can be used to calculate the number of spanning trees for a given graph. The sparsest cut of a graph can be approximated through the second eigenvalue of its Laplacian by Cheeger's inequality .
Definition[edit]
Given a simple graph G with n vertices, its Laplacian matrix is defined as:[1]
where D is the degree matrix and A is the adjacency matrix of the graph. In the case of directed graphs, either the indegree or outdegree might be used, depending on the application.
The elements of are given by
where deg(vi) is degree of the vertex i.
The symmetric normalized Laplacian matrix is defined as:[1]
-
,
The elements of are given by
The random-walk normalized Laplacian matrix is defined as:
The elements of are given by
Example[edit]
Here is a simple example of a labeled graph and its Laplacian matrix.
Labeled graph | Degree matrix | Adjacency matrix | Laplacian matrix |
---|---|---|---|
![]() |
Properties[edit]
For an (undirected) graph G and its Laplacian matrix L with eigenvalues :
- L is symmetric.
- L is positive-semidefinite (that is
for all i). This is verified in the incidence matrix section (below). This can also be seen from the fact that the Laplacian is symmetric and diagonally dominant.
- L is an M-matrix (its off-diagonal entries are nonpositive, yet the real parts of its eigenvalues are nonnegative).
- Every row sum and column sum of L is zero. Indeed, in the sum, the degree of the vertex is summed with a "-1" for each neighbor.
- In consequence,
, because the vector
satisfies
- The number of times 0 appears as an eigenvalue in the Laplacian is the number of connected components in the graph.
- The smallest non-zero eigenvalue of L is called the spectral gap.
- The second smallest eigenvalue of L is the algebraic connectivity (or Fiedler value) of G.
- The Laplacian is an operator on the n-dimensional vector space of functions f : V →
, where V is the vertex set of G, and n = |V|.
- When G is k-regular, the normalized Laplacian is:
, where A is the adjacency matrix and I is an identity matrix.
- For a graph with multiple connected components, L is a block diagonal matrix, where each block is the respective Laplacian matrix for each component, possibly after reordering the vertices (i.e. L is permutation-similar to a block diagonal matrix).
- Laplacian matrix is singular.