  How does coarsening affect the spectrum of a general graph? We provide
conditions such that the principal eigenvalues and eigenspaces of a coarsened
and original graph Laplacian matrices are close. The achieved approximation is
shown to depend on standard graph-theoretic properties, such as the degree and
eigenvalue distributions, as well as on the ratio between the coarsened and
actual graph sizes. Our results carry implications for learning methods that
utilize coarsening. For the particular case of spectral clustering, they imply
that coarse eigenvectors can be used to derive good quality assignments even
without refinement---this phenomenon was previously observed, but lacked formal
justification.
