Graph Spectral Series and Its Signatures

Abstract

Bandlimitedness is a central modeling assumption in graph signal processing (GSP), but many graph signals exhibit substantial energy throughout the graph-frequency domain. We introduce a new framework for analyzing such non-bandlimited signals by treating their graph Fourier spectra as ordered sequences and representing them with path signatures. Specifically, motivated by the observation that non-bandlimited graph spectra often display rough, time-series like behavior, we introduce the notion of graph spectral series and develop a signature-based representation that captures global spectral structure without frequency truncation. We establish conditions under which the proposed representation is continuous and characterize its information-preserving properties. We further provide an asymptotic interpretation of graph spectral series for sequences of expanding graphs. Experiments on real-world trend-prediction and change-detection tasks show that signature features can improve performance over representations based directly on the original graph signals. The proposed approach provides a novel principled signature-based tool for analyzing non-bandlimited graph signals.