  The graph Laplacian plays key roles in information processing of relational
data, and has analogies with the Laplacian in differential geometry. In this
paper, we generalize the analogy between graph Laplacian and differential
geometry to the hypergraph setting, and propose a novel hypergraph
$p$-Laplacian. Unlike the existing two-node graph Laplacians, this
generalization makes it possible to analyze hypergraphs, where the edges are
allowed to connect any number of nodes. Moreover, we propose a semi-supervised
learning method based on the proposed hypergraph $p$-Laplacian, and formalize
them as the analogue to the Dirichlet problem, which often appears in physics.
We further explore theoretical connections to normalized hypergraph cut on a
hypergraph, and propose normalized cut corresponding to hypergraph
$p$-Laplacian. The proposed $p$-Laplacian is shown to outperform standard
hypergraph Laplacians in the experiment on a hypergraph semi-supervised
learning and normalized cut setting.
