8,515 research outputs found
Computational Complexity of the Interleaving Distance
The interleaving distance is arguably the most prominent distance measure in
topological data analysis. In this paper, we provide bounds on the
computational complexity of determining the interleaving distance in several
settings. We show that the interleaving distance is NP-hard to compute for
persistence modules valued in the category of vector spaces. In the specific
setting of multidimensional persistent homology we show that the problem is at
least as hard as a matrix invertibility problem. Furthermore, this allows us to
conclude that the interleaving distance of interval decomposable modules
depends on the characteristic of the field. Persistence modules valued in the
category of sets are also studied. As a corollary, we obtain that the
isomorphism problem for Reeb graphs is graph isomorphism complete.Comment: Discussion related to the characteristic of the field added. Paper
accepted to the 34th International Symposium on Computational Geometr
Computational Complexity of the Interleaving Distance
The interleaving distance is arguably the most prominent distance measure in topological data analysis. In this paper, we provide bounds on the computational complexity of determining the interleaving distance in several settings. We show that the interleaving distance is NP-hard to compute for persistence modules valued in the category of vector spaces. In the specific setting of multidimensional persistent homology we show that the problem is at least as hard as a matrix invertibility problem. Furthermore, this allows us to conclude that the interleaving distance of interval decomposable modules depends on the characteristic of the field. Persistence modules valued in the category of sets are also studied. As a corollary, we obtain that the isomorphism problem for Reeb graphs is graph isomorphism complete
Computing the interleaving distance is NP-hard
We show that computing the interleaving distance between two multi-graded
persistence modules is NP-hard. More precisely, we show that deciding whether
two modules are -interleaved is NP-complete, already for bigraded, interval
decomposable modules. Our proof is based on previous work showing that a
constrained matrix invertibility problem can be reduced to the interleaving
distance computation of a special type of persistence modules. We show that
this matrix invertibility problem is NP-complete. We also give a slight
improvement of the above reduction, showing that also the approximation of the
interleaving distance is NP-hard for any approximation factor smaller than .
Additionally, we obtain corresponding hardness results for the case that the
modules are indecomposable, and in the setting of one-sided stability.
Furthermore, we show that checking for injections (resp. surjections) between
persistence modules is NP-hard. In conjunction with earlier results from
computational algebra this gives a complete characterization of the
computational complexity of one-sided stability. Lastly, we show that it is in
general NP-hard to approximate distances induced by noise systems within a
factor of 2.Comment: 25 pages. Several expository improvements and minor corrections. Also
added a section on noise system
FPT-Algorithms for Computing Gromov-Hausdorff and Interleaving Distances Between Trees
The Gromov-Hausdorff distance is a natural way to measure the distortion between two metric spaces. However, there has been only limited algorithmic development to compute or approximate this distance. We focus on computing the Gromov-Hausdorff distance between two metric trees. Roughly speaking, a metric tree is a metric space that can be realized by the shortest path metric on a tree. Any finite tree with positive edge weight can be viewed as a metric tree where the weight is treated as edge length and the metric is the induced shortest path metric in the tree. Previously, Agarwal et al. showed that even for trees with unit edge length, it is NP-hard to approximate the Gromov-Hausdorff distance between them within a factor of 3. In this paper, we present a fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithm that can approximate the Gromov-Hausdorff distance between two general metric trees within a multiplicative factor of 14.
Interestingly, the development of our algorithm is made possible by a connection between the Gromov-Hausdorff distance for metric trees and the interleaving distance for the so-called merge trees. The merge trees arise in practice naturally as a simple yet meaningful topological summary (it is a variant of the Reeb graphs and contour trees), and are of independent interest. It turns out that an exact or approximation algorithm for the interleaving distance leads to an approximation algorithm for the Gromov-Hausdorff distance. One of the key contributions of our work is that we re-define the interleaving distance in a way that makes it easier to develop dynamic programming approaches to compute it. We then present a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm to compute the interleaving distance between two merge trees exactly, which ultimately leads to an FPT-algorithm to approximate the Gromov-Hausdorff distance between two metric trees. This exact FPT-algorithm to compute the interleaving distance between merge trees is of interest itself, as it is known that it is NP-hard to approximate it within a factor of 3, and previously the best known algorithm has an approximation factor of O(sqrt{n}) even for trees with unit edge length
Sparse Nerves in Practice
Topological data analysis combines machine learning with methods from
algebraic topology. Persistent homology, a method to characterize topological
features occurring in data at multiple scales is of particular interest. A
major obstacle to the wide-spread use of persistent homology is its
computational complexity. In order to be able to calculate persistent homology
of large datasets, a number of approximations can be applied in order to reduce
its complexity. We propose algorithms for calculation of approximate sparse
nerves for classes of Dowker dissimilarities including all finite Dowker
dissimilarities and Dowker dissimilarities whose homology is Cech persistent
homology. All other sparsification methods and software packages that we are
aware of calculate persistent homology with either an additive or a
multiplicative interleaving. In dowker_homology, we allow for any
non-decreasing interleaving function . We analyze the computational
complexity of the algorithms and present some benchmarks. For Euclidean data in
dimensions larger than three, the sizes of simplicial complexes we create are
in general smaller than the ones created by SimBa. Especially when calculating
persistent homology in higher homology dimensions, the differences can become
substantial
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