Asymptotic Analysis of the Ginzburg-Landau Functional on Point Clouds
  The Ginzburg-Landau functional is a phase transition model which is suitable for clustering or classification type problems. We study the asymptotics of a sequence of Ginzburg-Landau functionals with anisotropic interaction potentials on point clouds $\Psi_n$ where $n$ denotes the number data points. In particular we show the limiting problem, in the sense of $\Gamma$-convergence, is related to the total variation norm restricted to functions taking binary values; which can be understood as a surface energy. We generalize the result known for isotropic interaction potentials to the anisotropic case and add a result concerning the rate of convergence. 
Matthew Thorpe and Florian Theil
math.AP