The Gromov-Wasserstein distance between networks and stable network invariants

Abstract: We define a metric---the network Gromov-Wasserstein distance---on weighted, directed networks that is sensitive to the presence of outliers. In addition to proving its theoretical properties, we supply network invariants based on optimal transport that approximate this distance by means of lower bounds. We test these methods on a range of simulated network datasets and on a dataset of real-world global bilateral migration. For our simulations, we define a network generative model based on the stochastic block model. This may be of independent interest for benchmarking purposes.