Elements in Non-local Data Interactions: Foundations and Applications - Böcker

Extracting the latent underlying structures of complex nonlinear local and nonlocal flows is essential for their analysis and modeling. In this Element the authors attempt to provide a consistent framework through Koopman theory and its related popular discrete approximation - dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). They investigate the conditions to perform appropriate linearization, dimensionality reduction and representation of flows in a highly general setting. The essential elements of this framework are Koopman eigenfunctions (KEFs) for which existence conditions are formulated. This is done by viewing the dynamic as a curve in state-space. These conditions lay the foundations for system reconstruction, global controllability, and observability for nonlinear dynamics. They examine the limitations of DMD through the analysis of Koopman theory and propose a new mode decomposition technique based on the typical time profile of the dynamics.

In this Element, the authors consider fully discretized p-Laplacian problems (evolution, boundary value and variational problems) on graphs. The motivation of nonlocal continuum limits comes from the quest of understanding collective dynamics in large ensembles of interacting particles, which is a fundamental problem in nonlinear science, with applications ranging from biology to physics, chemistry and computer science. Using the theory of graphons, the authors give a unified treatment of all the above problems and establish the continuum limit for each of them together with non-asymptotic convergence rates. They also describe an algorithmic framework based proximal splitting to solve these discrete problems on graphs.

Normalizing flows, diffusion normalizing flows and variational autoencoders are powerful generative models. This Element provides a unified framework to handle these approaches via Markov chains. The authors consider stochastic normalizing flows as a pair of Markov chains fulfilling some properties, and show how many state-of-the-art models for data generation fit into this framework. Indeed numerical simulations show that including stochastic layers improves the expressivity of the network and allows for generating multimodal distributions from unimodal ones. The Markov chains point of view enables the coupling of both deterministic layers as invertible neural networks and stochastic layers as Metropolis-Hasting layers, Langevin layers, variational autoencoders and diffusion normalizing flows in a mathematically sound way. The authors' framework establishes a useful mathematical tool to combine the various approaches.

The use of differential equations on graphs as a framework for the mathematical analysis of images emerged about fifteen years ago and since then it has burgeoned, and with applications also to machine learning. The authors have written a bird's eye view of theoretical developments that will enable newcomers to quickly get a flavour of key results and ideas. Additionally, they provide an substantial bibliography which will point readers to where fuller details and other directions can be explored. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.