
FORECASTING GRAPH SIGNALS WITH RECURSIVE MIMO GRAPH FILTERS
Jelmer van der Hoeven, Alberto Natali and Geert Leus
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
Forecasting time series on graphs is a fundamental problem in graph
signal processing. When each entity of the network carries a vector of
values for each time stamp instead of a scalar one, existing approaches
resort to the use of product graphs to combine this multidimensional
information, at the expense of creating a larger graph. In this paper,
we show the limitations of such approaches, and propose extensions
to tackle them. Then, we propose a recursive multiple-input multiple-
output graph filter which encompasses many already existing models
in the literature while being more flexible. Numerical simulations on
a real world data set show the effectiveness of the proposed models.
Index Terms—
Forecasting, Graph Signal Processing, Product
Graph, Multi-dimensional graph signals
1. INTRODUCTION
Forecasting time series collected by entities of a network is a central
problem in graph signal processing (GSP) [
1
], finding applications in
sensor [
2
] and social networks [
3
,
4
], to name a few. Accounting for
the network structure in the forecasting model serves as an inductive
bias to reduce the number of estimation parameters of the model [
5
,
6
] compared to classical vector autoregressive (VAR) models [
?
].
However, existing models under a GSP lens consider a scalar value
at each node for each time instant [
8
,
9
,
6
], which is a limitation in
networks where a (feature) vector of measurements is available at
each node for each time instant, such as in meteorological sensor
networks or 3D point clouds.
This multidimensional case has been recently addressed in [
10
]
with the introduction of a so-called feature graph, capturing the possi-
ble relationships among the features of a node of the network. There,
the authors make use of product graphs [
11
] to create a new larger
graph that combines in a principled way the original and the feature
graphs, which is then used to forecast these multidimensional content
by taking into account relationships among features of different nodes.
However, the knowledge of which product graph to use and how to
construct the feature graph has not been properly elaborated.
This work can be considered an extension of [
10
] in that: i)
we first delineate drawbacks of the proposed model and introduce
minor extensions to tackle them; then, ii) we propose a recursive
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) graph filter which general-
izes the already existing filters while being more flexible; finally, iii)
we put forth a method which learns the weights of the feature graph
during the training process. We limit our exposition to linear mod-
els, although non-linear autoregressive models are a subject worth
investigating. Numerical experiments on real-world data show the
effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
E-mails:{Jelmer.van.der.hoeven@pwc.com}
{a.natali;g.j.t.leus}@tudelft.nl;
2. BACKGROUND
Consider an
N
-dimensional time series
xt∈RN
, where entry
xt(i)
represents the value at time
t
associated to the entry
i
. For instance,
xt(i)
might represent the amount of water in the
i
th reservoir of a
water network at time
t
. When the relationships between the different
time series of
xt
can be captured by a network, let the graph
G:=
(V,E,S)
model such network, where
V={v1,...,vN}
is the set
of
N
nodes,
E ⊆ V × V
is the set of edges, and
S∈RN×N
is
the matrix representation of the graph, which captures its sparsity
pattern; i.e.,
Sij 6= 0
if and only if
(vi, vj)∈ E
or
vi=vj
. We refer
to matrix
S
as the graph shift operator (GSO), examples of which
include the adjacency matrix and the Laplacian matrix [
12
,
13
]. In
this context, xtis called a graph signal.
We can instantly process a graph signal
xt
to obtain a new graph
signal ytby means of the so-called graph convolution [1]:
yt=
K−1
X
k=0
hkSkxt,(1)
where
H(S) := PK−1
k=0 hkSk
is the graph filter [
14
] of order
K−1
with scalar coefficients
h0,...,hK−1
. Because matrix
S
is sparse,
the computational complexity of the graph filtering operation
(1)
is
O(|E|K)
. To forecast time series residing on the nodes, a graph
vector autoregressive (G-VAR) model has been introduced in [
6
] as
the combination of a finite number of graph convolutions; specifically:
xt=−
P
X
p=1
Hp(S)xt−p=−
P
X
p=1
K−1
X
k=0
hkpSkxt−p,(2)
where
xt−p
represents the graph signal at time instant
t−p
and
hkp
represents the
k
th scalar filter coefficient of the
p
-th graph filter
Hp(S)
. The computational complexity of
(2)
is
O(P K|E|)
and the
number of parameters of the filter is
P K
, both independent of the
size of the network.
Multidimensional.
When each node of the network carries a vec-
tor of
F
values (features) for each time instant
t
, we refer to such
a graph signal as being
F
-dimensional, and denote it as
xt=
[x>
t(1),...,x>
t(F)]>∈RNF
, where each
xt(f)∈RN
is the
one-dimensional graph signal associated to feature
f
. In other words,
xt
is the concatenation of
F
graph signals, each one representing the
graph signal associated to one specific feature.
To efficiently deal with such multi-dimensional graph signals, the
work in [
10
] proposes to model the dependencies among the features
with a so-called feature graph defined as
GF:= (VF,EF,SF)
,
where
VF={f1, ...., fF}
is the set of
F
nodes representing the
features,
EF⊆ VF× VF
is the set of edges defining how the features
are connected, and
SF
is the associated GSO. To formally capture
the dependencies among features of different nodes,
G
and
GF
can be
combined with the use of product graphs [
15
] to create a new graph
arXiv:2210.15258v1 [eess.SP] 27 Oct 2022