A New Transport Distance and Its Associated Ricci Curvature of Hypergraphs

Abstract The coarse Ricci curvature of graphs introduced by Ollivier as well as its modification by Lin–Lu– Yau have been studied from various aspects. In this paper, we propose a new transport distance appropriate for hypergraphs and study a generalization of Lin–Lu–Yau type curvature of hypergraphs. As an application, we derive a Bonnet–Myers type estimate for hypergraphs under a lower Ricci curvature bound associated with our transport distance. We remark that our transport distance is new even for graphs and worthy of further study.