Multiscale Hodge Scattering Networks for Data Analysis

We propose new scattering networks for signals measured on simplicial complexes, which we call Multiscale Hodge Scattering Networks (MHSNs). Our construction builds on multiscale basis dictionaries on simplicial complexes—namely, the κ -GHWT and κ -HGLET—which we recently developed for simplices of dimension κ ∈ N in a given simplicial complex by generalizing the node-based Generalized Haar–Walsh Transform (GHWT) and Hierarchical Graph Laplacian Eigen Transform (HGLET). Both the κ -GHWT and the κ -HGLET form redundant sets (i.e., dictionaries) of multiscale basis vectors and the corresponding expansion coefficients of a given signal. Our MHSNs adopt a layered structure analogous to a convolutional neural network (CNN), cascading the moments of the modulus of the dictionary coefficients. The resulting features are invariant to reordering of the simplices (i.e., node permutation of the underlying graphs). Importantly, the use of multiscale basis dictionaries in our MHSNs admits a natural pooling operation—akin to local pooling in CNNs—that can be performed either locally or per scale. Such pooling operations are more difficult to define in traditional scattering networks based on Morlet wavelets and in geometric scattering networks based on Diffusion Wavelets. As a result, our approach extracts a rich set of descriptive yet robust features that can be combined with simple machine learning models (e.g., logistic regression or support vector machines) to achieve high-accuracy classification with far fewer trainable parameters than most modern graph neural networks require. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MHSNs on three distinct problem types: signal classification, domain (i.e., graph/simplex) classification, and molecular dynamics prediction.