Chunk Reduction for Multi-Parameter Persistent Homology

The extension of persistent homology to multi-parameter setups is an algorithmic challenge. Since most computation tasks scale badly with the size of the input complex, an important pre-processing step consists of simplifying the input while maintaining the homological information. We present an algorithm that drastically reduces the size of an input. Our approach is an extension of the chunk algorithm for persistent homology (Bauer et al., Topological Methods in Data Analysis and Visualization III, 2014). We show that our construction produces the smallest multi-filtered chain complex among all the complexes quasi-isomorphic to the input, improving on the guarantees of previous work in the context of discrete Morse theory. Our algorithm also offers an immediate parallelization scheme in shared memory. Already its sequential version compares favorably with existing simplification schemes, as we show by experimental evaluation

A discrete Morse-based approach to multivariate data analysis

Multivariate data are becoming more and more popular in several applications, including physics, chemistry, medicine, geography, etc. A multivariate dataset is represented by a cell complex and a vector-valued function defined on the complex vertices. The major challenge arising when dealing with multivariate data is to obtain concise and effective visualizations. The usability of common visual elements (e.g., color, shape, size) deteriorates when the number of variables increases. Here, we consider Discrete Morse Theory (DMT) [Forman 1998] for computing a discrete gradient field on a multivariate dataset. We propose a new algorithm, well suited for parallel and distribute implementations. We discuss the importance of obtaining the discrete gradient as a compact representation of the original complex to be involved in the computation of multidimensional persistent homology. Moreover, the discrete gradient field that we obtain is at the basis of a visualization tool for capturing the mutual relationships among the different functions of the dataset

A discrete Morse-based approach to multivariate data analysis

Multivariate data are becoming more and more popular in several applications, including physics, chemistry, medicine, geography, etc. A multivariate dataset is represented by a cell complex and a vector-valued function defined on the complex vertices. The major challenge arising when dealing with multivariate data is to obtain concise and effective visualizations. The usability of common visual elements (e.g., color, shape, size) deteriorates when the number of variables increases. Here, we consider Discrete Morse Theory (DMT) [Forman 1998] for computing a discrete gradient field on a multivariate dataset. We propose a new algorithm, well suited for parallel and distribute implementations. We discuss the importance of obtaining the discrete gradient as a compact representation of the original complex to be involved in the computation of multidimensional persistent homology. Moreover, the discrete gradient field that we obtain is at the basis of a visualization tool for capturing the mutual relationships among the different functions of the dataset