Fluctuations in Wasserstein dynamics on Graphs

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a drift-diffusion process on the probability simplex to study stochastic fluctuations in probability spaces. We construct a counting process for linear detailed balanced chemical reactions with finite species such that its thermodynamic limit is a system of ordinary differential equations (ODE) on the probability simplex. This ODE can be formulated as a gradient flow with an Onsager response matrix that induces a Riemannian metric on the probability simplex. After incorporating the induced Riemannian structure, we propose a diffusion approximation of the rescaled counting process for molecular species in the chemical reactions, which leads to Langevin dynamics on the probability simplex with a degenerate Brownian motion constructed from the eigen-decomposition of Onsager's response matrix. The corresponding Fokker-Planck equation on the simplex can be regarded as the usual drift-diffusion equation with the extrinsic representation of the divergence and Laplace-Beltrami operator. The invariant measure is the Gibbs measure, which is the product of the original macroscopic free energy and a volume element. When the drift term vanishes, the Fokker-Planck equation reduces to the heat equation with the Laplace-Beltrami operator, which we refer to as canonical Wasserstein diffusions on graphs. In the case of a two-point probability simplex, the constructed diffusion process is converted to one dimensional Wright-Fisher diffusion process, which leads to a natural boundary condition ensuring that the process remains within the probability simplex.