Heat diffusion is a physical phenomena. In a medium, heat always flow from position with high temperature to position with low temperature. Heat kernel is used to describe the amount of heat that one point receives from another point.
Recently a heat diffusion-based approach has been successfully applied in various domains such as classification tasks (Heat Kernel) and dimensionality reduction (EigenMap).
We employ the Heat Diffusion Model to construct a classifier called Volume-based Heat Diffusion Classifier (VHDC), which is a generalization of KNN and the Parzen Window Approach. Also we employ the Heat Diffusion Model to build a ranking algorithm called DiffusionRank, which is a generalization of PageRank.
