Ephemeral Persistence Features and the Stability of Filtered Chain Complexes

We strengthen the usual stability theorem for Vietoris-Rips (VR) persistent homology of finite metric spaces by building upon constructions due to Usher and Zhang in the context of filtered chain complexes. The information present at the level of filtered chain complexes includes ephemeral points, i.e. points with zero persistence, which provide additional information to that present at homology level. The resulting invariant, called verbose barcode, which has a stronger discriminating power than the usual barcode, is proved to be stable under certain metrics which are sensitive to these ephemeral points. In some situations, we provide ways to compute such metrics between verbose barcodes. We also exhibit several examples of finite metric spaces with identical (standard) VR barcodes yet with different verbose VR barcodes thus confirming that these ephemeral points strengthen the discriminating power of the standard VR barcode

The Reeb Graph Edit Distance Is Universal

We consider the setting of Reeb graphs of piecewise linear functions and study distances between them that are stable, meaning that functions which are similar in the supremum norm ought to have similar Reeb graphs. We define an edit distance for Reeb graphs and prove that it is stable and universal, meaning that it provides an upper bound to any other stable distance. In contrast, via a specific construction, we show that the interleaving distance and the functional distortion distance on Reeb graphs are not universal

Rectification of interleavings and a persistent Whitehead theorem

The homotopy interleaving distance, a distance between persistent spaces, was introduced by Blumberg and Lesnick and shown to be universal, in the sense that it is the largest homotopy-invariant distance for which sublevel-set filtrations of close-by real-valued functions are close-by. There are other ways of constructing homotopy-invariant distances, but not much is known about the relationships between these choices. We show that other natural distances differ from the homotopy interleaving distance in at most a multiplicative constant, and prove versions of the persistent Whitehead theorem, a conjecture of Blumberg and Lesnick that relates morphisms that induce interleavings in persistent homotopy groups to stronger homotopy-invariant notions of interleaving.Comment: 35 pages. V2: Improved constant of Thm A and minor exposition improvements. Comments are welcom