78 research outputs found
Persistence-Based Clustering in Riemannian Manifolds
We present a novel clustering algorithm that combines a mode-seeking phase with a cluster merging phase. While mode detection is performed by a standard graph-based hill-climbing scheme, the novelty of our approach resides in its use of {\em topological persistence} theory to guide the merges between clusters. An interesting feature of our algorithm is to provide additional feedback in the form of a finite set of points in the plane, called a {\em persistence diagram}, which provably reflects the prominence of each of the modes of the density. Such feedback is an invaluable tool in practice, as it enables the user to determine a set of parameter values that will make the algorithm compute a relevant clustering on the next run. In terms of generality, our approach requires the sole knowledge of (approximate) pairwise distances between the data points, as well as of rough estimates of the density at these points. It is therefore virtually applicable in any arbitrary metric space. In the meantime, its complexity remains reasonable: although the size of the input distance matrix may be up to quadratic in the number of data points, a careful implementation only uses a linear amount of main memory and barely takes more time to run than the one spent reading the input. Taking advantage of recent advances in topological persistence theory, we are able to give a theoretically sound notion of what the {\em correct} number of clusters is, and to prove that under mild sampling conditions and a relevant choice of parameters (made possible in practice by the persistence diagram) our clustering scheme computes a set of clusters whose spatial locations are bound to the ones of the basins of attraction of the peaks of the density. These guarantess hold in a large variety of contexts, including when data points are distributed along some unknown Riemannian manifold
A Stable Multi-Scale Kernel for Topological Machine Learning
Topological data analysis offers a rich source of valuable information to
study vision problems. Yet, so far we lack a theoretically sound connection to
popular kernel-based learning techniques, such as kernel SVMs or kernel PCA. In
this work, we establish such a connection by designing a multi-scale kernel for
persistence diagrams, a stable summary representation of topological features
in data. We show that this kernel is positive definite and prove its stability
with respect to the 1-Wasserstein distance. Experiments on two benchmark
datasets for 3D shape classification/retrieval and texture recognition show
considerable performance gains of the proposed method compared to an
alternative approach that is based on the recently introduced persistence
landscapes
Supervised Learning with Indefinite Topological Kernels
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a recent and growing branch of statistics
devoted to the study of the shape of the data. In this work we investigate the
predictive power of TDA in the context of supervised learning. Since
topological summaries, most noticeably the Persistence Diagram, are typically
defined in complex spaces, we adopt a kernel approach to translate them into
more familiar vector spaces. We define a topological exponential kernel, we
characterize it, and we show that, despite not being positive semi-definite, it
can be successfully used in regression and classification tasks
Exact Computation of a Manifold Metric, via Lipschitz Embeddings and Shortest Paths on a Graph
Data-sensitive metrics adapt distances locally based the density of data
points with the goal of aligning distances and some notion of similarity. In
this paper, we give the first exact algorithm for computing a data-sensitive
metric called the nearest neighbor metric. In fact, we prove the surprising
result that a previously published -approximation is an exact algorithm.
The nearest neighbor metric can be viewed as a special case of a
density-based distance used in machine learning, or it can be seen as an
example of a manifold metric. Previous computational research on such metrics
despaired of computing exact distances on account of the apparent difficulty of
minimizing over all continuous paths between a pair of points. We leverage the
exact computation of the nearest neighbor metric to compute sparse spanners and
persistent homology. We also explore the behavior of the metric built from
point sets drawn from an underlying distribution and consider the more general
case of inputs that are finite collections of path-connected compact sets.
The main results connect several classical theories such as the conformal
change of Riemannian metrics, the theory of positive definite functions of
Schoenberg, and screw function theory of Schoenberg and Von Neumann. We develop
novel proof techniques based on the combination of screw functions and
Lipschitz extensions that may be of independent interest.Comment: 15 page
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