Slepian Wavelets for the Analysis of Incomplete Data on Manifolds

Many fields in science and engineering measure data that inherently live on non-Euclidean geometries, such as the sphere. Techniques developed in the Euclidean setting must be extended to other geometries. Due to recent interest in geometric deep learning, analogues of Euclidean techniques must also handle general manifolds or graphs. Often, data are only observed over partial regions of manifolds, and thus standard whole-manifold techniques may not yield accurate predictions. In this thesis, a new wavelet basis is designed for datasets like these. Although many definitions of spherical convolutions exist, none fully emulate the Euclidean definition. A novel spherical convolution is developed, designed to tackle the shortcomings of existing methods. The so-called sifting convolution exploits the sifting property of the Dirac delta and follows by the inner product of a function with the translated version of another. This translation operator is analogous to the Euclidean translation in harmonic space and exhibits some useful properties. In particular, the sifting convolution supports directional kernels; has an output that remains on the sphere; and is efficient to compute. The convolution is entirely generic and thus may be used with any set of basis functions. An application of the sifting convolution with a topographic map of the Earth demonstrates that it supports directional kernels to perform anisotropic filtering. Slepian wavelets are built upon the eigenfunctions of the Slepian concentration problem of the manifold - a set of bandlimited functions which are maximally concentrated within a given region. Wavelets are constructed through a tiling of the Slepian harmonic line by leveraging the existing scale-discretised framework. A straightforward denoising formalism demonstrates a boost in signal-to-noise for both a spherical and general manifold example. Whilst these wavelets were inspired by spherical datasets, like in cosmology, the wavelet construction may be utilised for manifold or graph data