No Arabic abstract
Comparison between multidimensional persistent Betti numbers is often based on the multidimensional matching distance. While this metric is rather simple to define and compute by considering a suitable family of filtering functions associated with lines having a positive slope, it has two main drawbacks. First, it forgets the natural link between the homological properties of filtrations associated with lines that are close to each other. As a consequence, part of the interesting homological information is lost. Second, its intrinsically discontinuous definition makes it difficult to study its properties. In this paper we introduce a new matching distance for 2D persistent Betti numbers, called coherent matching distance and based on matchings that change coherently with the filtrations we take into account. Its definition is not trivial, as it must face the presence of monodromy in multidimensional persistence, i.e. the fact that different paths in the space parameterizing the above filtrations can induce different matchings between the associated persistent diagrams. In our paper we prove that the coherent 2D matching distance is well-defined and stable.
In this paper we study a new metric for comparing Betti numbers functions in bidimensional persistent homology, based on coherent matchings, i.e. families of matchings that vary in a continuous way. We prove some new results about this metric, including its stability. In particular, we show that the computation of this distance is strongly related to suitable filtering functions associated with lines of slope 1, so underlining the key role of these lines in the study of bidimensional persistence. In order to prove these results, we introduce and study the concepts of extended Pareto grid for a normal filtering function as well as of transport of a matching. As a by-product, we obtain a theoretical framework for managing the phenomenon of monodromy in 2D persistent homology.
We propose a general technique for extracting a larger set of stable information from persistent homology computations than is currently done. The persistent homology algorithm is usually viewed as a procedure which starts with a filtered complex and ends with a persistence diagram. This procedure is stable (at least to certain types of perturbations of the input). This justifies the use of the diagram as a signature of the input, and the use of features derived from it in statistics and machine learning. However, these computations also produce other information of great interest to practitioners that is unfortunately unstable. For example, each point in the diagram corresponds to a simplex whose addition in the filtration results in the birth of the corresponding persistent homology class, but this correspondence is unstable. In addition, the persistence diagram is not stable with respect to other procedures that are employed in practice, such as thresholding a point cloud by density. We recast these problems as real-valued functions which are discontinuous but measurable, and then observe that convolving such a function with a suitable function produces a Lipschitz function. The resulting stable function can be estimated by perturbing the input and averaging the output. We illustrate this approach with a number of examples, including a stable localization of a persistent homology generator from brain imaging data.
We develop a method for analyzing spatiotemporal anomalies in geospatial data using topological data analysis (TDA). To do this, we use persistent homology (PH), a tool from TDA that allows one to algorithmically detect geometric voids in a data set and quantify the persistence of these voids. We construct an efficient filtered simplicial complex (FSC) such that the voids in our FSC are in one-to-one correspondence with the anomalies. Our approach goes beyond simply identifying anomalies; it also encodes information about the relationships between anomalies. We use vineyards, which one can interpret as time-varying persistence diagrams (an approach for visualizing PH), to track how the locations of the anomalies change over time. We conduct two case studies using spatially heterogeneous COVID-19 data. First, we examine vaccination rates in New York City by zip code. Second, we study a year-long data set of COVID-19 case rates in neighborhoods in the city of Los Angeles.
Persistent Topology studies topological features of shapes by analyzing the lower level sets of suitable functions, called filtering functions, and encoding the arising information in a parameterized version of the Betti numbers, i.e. the ranks of persistent homology groups. Initially introduced by considering real-valued filtering functions, Persistent Topology has been subsequently generalized to a multidimensional setting, i.e. to the case of $R^n$-valued filtering functions, leading to studying the ranks of multidimensional homology groups. In particular, a multidimensional matching distance has been defined, in order to compare these ranks. The definition of the multidimensional matching distance is based on foliating the domain of the ranks of multidimensional homology groups by a collection of half-planes, and hence it formally depends on a subset of $R^ntimesR^n$ inducing a parameterization of these half-planes. It happens that it is possible to choose this subset in an infinite number of different ways. In this paper we show that the multidimensional matching distance is actually invariant with respect to such a choice.
In topological data analysis, persistent homology is used to study the shape of data. Persistent homology computations are completely characterized by a set of intervals called a bar code. It is often said that the long intervals represent the topological signal and the short intervals represent noise. We give evidence to dispute this thesis, showing that the short intervals encode geometric information. Specifically, we prove that persistent homology detects the curvature of disks from which points have been sampled. We describe a general computational framework for solving inverse problems using the average persistence landscape, a continuous mapping from metric spaces with a probability measure to a Hilbert space. In the present application, the average persistence landscapes of points sampled from disks of constant curvature results in a path in this Hilbert space which may be learned using standard tools from statistical and machine learning.