Invariant Graph Partition Comparison Measures

Abstract

Symmetric graphs have non-trivial automorphism groups. This article starts with the proof that all partition comparison measures we have found in the literature fail on symmetric graphs, because they are not invariant with regard to the graph automorphisms. By the construction of a pseudometric space of equivalence classes of permutations and with Hausdorff’s and von Neumann’s methods of constructing invariant measures on the space of equivalence classes, we design three different families of invariant measures, and we present two types of invariance proofs. Last, but not least, we provide algorithms for computing invariant partition comparison measures as pseudometrics on the partition space. When combining an invariant partition comparison measure with its classical counterpart, the decomposition of the measure into a structural difference and a difference contributed by the group automorphism is derived.

Keywords

• graph partitioning
• graph clustering
• invariant measures
• partition comparison
• finite automorphism groups
• graph automorphisms