Engineering Math - Graph Theory

Laplacian/Combinatorial Laplacian/Normalized Laplacian

Formal definition of Laplacian is as follows.  In a Graph G, Laplacian L is defined as

What is 'di' ? It is the diagonal elelment of 'Degree Matrix'. Actually, Laplacian can be obtained by combining the degree matrix and the adjacency matrix as follows.

Example >

Let's assume that we have a Graph as shown below.

The adjacency matrix of this graph is as follows (try to build this matrix on your own as a practice).

The degree matrix of this graph is as follows (try to build this matrix on your own as a practice).

The Laplacian of this graph calculated from 'D-A' become as follows.

In many case, 'Normalized Laplacian' are used. The Normalized Laplacian is defined as follows. (As you see, we divide all the elements of Laplacian in such a way that the diagonal values become '1'. (di is the diagonal values on Laplacian matrix).

Normalized Laplacian given in this example become as follows :