PersLay: A Neural Network Layer for Persistence Diagrams and New Graph Topological Signatures

Persistence diagrams, the most common descriptors of Topological Data Analysis, encode topological properties of data and have already proved pivotal in many different applications of data science. However, since the (metric) space of persistence diagrams is not Hilbert, they end up being difficult inputs for most Machine Learning techniques. To address this concern, several vectorization methods have been put forward that embed persistence diagrams into either finite-dimensional Euclidean space or (implicit) infinite dimensional Hilbert space with kernels. In this work, we focus on persistence diagrams built on top of graphs. Relying on extended persistence theory and the so-called heat kernel signature, we show how graphs can be encoded by (extended) persistence diagrams in a provably stable way. We then propose a general and versatile framework for learning vectorizations of persistence diagrams, which encompasses most of the vectorization techniques used in the literature. We finally showcase the experimental strength of our setup by achieving competitive scores on classification tasks on real-life graph datasets

Local Equivalence and Intrinsic Metrics between Reeb Graphs

As graphical summaries for topological spaces and maps, Reeb graphs are common objects in the computer graphics or topological data analysis literature. Defining good metrics between these objects has become an important question for applications, where it matters to quantify the extent by which two given Reeb graphs differ. Recent contributions emphasize this aspect, proposing novel distances such as {\em functional distortion} or {\em interleaving} that are provably more discriminative than the so-called {\em bottleneck distance}, being true metrics whereas the latter is only a pseudo-metric. Their main drawback compared to the bottleneck distance is to be comparatively hard (if at all possible) to evaluate. Here we take the opposite view on the problem and show that the bottleneck distance is in fact good enough {\em locally}, in the sense that it is able to discriminate a Reeb graph from any other Reeb graph in a small enough neighborhood, as efficiently as the other metrics do. This suggests considering the {\em intrinsic metrics} induced by these distances, which turn out to be all {\em globally} equivalent. This novel viewpoint on the study of Reeb graphs has a potential impact on applications, where one may not only be interested in discriminating between data but also in interpolating between them

Interpretable statistics for complex modelling: quantile and topological learning

As the complexity of our data increased exponentially in the last decades, so has our need for interpretable features. This thesis revolves around two paradigms to approach this quest for insights. In the first part we focus on parametric models, where the problem of interpretability can be seen as a “parametrization selection”. We introduce a quantile-centric parametrization and we show the advantages of our proposal in the context of regression, where it allows to bridge the gap between classical generalized linear (mixed) models and increasingly popular quantile methods. The second part of the thesis, concerned with topological learning, tackles the problem from a non-parametric perspective. As topology can be thought of as a way of characterizing data in terms of their connectivity structure, it allows to represent complex and possibly high dimensional through few features, such as the number of connected components, loops and voids. We illustrate how the emerging branch of statistics devoted to recovering topological structures in the data, Topological Data Analysis, can be exploited both for exploratory and inferential purposes with a special emphasis on kernels that preserve the topological information in the data. Finally, we show with an application how these two approaches can borrow strength from one another in the identification and description of brain activity through fMRI data from the ABIDE project