Minimum-Degree Distributed Graph Filter Design

Here we consider the problem of designing finite-impulse-response (FIR) graph filter (GF) in a fully distributed way. For a directed graph with N nodes, each node designs filter coefficients in a distributed manner, when the knowledge of the graph structure, recognized as global information, is unavailable to each node. By modeling graph signal shifting with observations at a node as a linear dynamical system, we establish fundamental connections between local response of shifting at anode, concerned in the graph signal processing (GSP) field, and the observability of the system, investigated in control theory. The observability, as a measure of how well internal states of a dynamical system can be learned from node's observations, is reflected by the minimal polynomial of a matrix pair related to the system. Specifically, by introducing a notion of observable graph frequencies to a node, we show that the output signals (observations) at a node only contain the spectral components of its so-called observable graph frequencies. Furthermore, we unveil that the observability of a node to the spectral components of a GS is related to the rank of its observability matrix from the perspective of control theory. Our work reveals that partial signal outputs at a node are sufficient to design the FIR GF locally in terms of node-variant (NV) GFs. These findings further enable us to characterize the minimum-degree NV GF, where a minimum number of its shifted GSs are involved in the filter's output, and devise a distributed GF design algorithm for it.