Convergence between Categorical Representations of Reeb Space and Mapper

The Reeb space, which generalizes the notion of a Reeb graph, is one of the few tools in topological data analysis and visualization suitable for the study of multivariate scientific datasets. First introduced by Edelsbrunner et al., it compresses the components of the level sets of a multivariate mapping and obtains a summary representation of their relationships. A related construction called mapper, and a special case of the mapper construction called the Joint Contour Net have been shown to be effective in visual analytics. Mapper and JCN are intuitively regarded as discrete approximations of the Reeb space, however without formal proofs or approximation guarantees. An open question has been proposed by Dey et al. as to whether the mapper construction converges to the Reeb space in the limit. In this paper, we are interested in developing the theoretical understanding of the relationship between the Reeb space and its discrete approximations to support its use in practical data analysis. Using tools from category theory, we formally prove the convergence between the Reeb space and mapper in terms of an interleaving distance between their categorical representations. Given a sequence of refined discretizations, we prove that these approximations converge to the Reeb space in the interleaving distance; this also helps to quantify the approximation quality of the discretization at a fixed resolution

Natural Stratifications of Reeb Spaces and Higher Morse Functions

Both Reeb spaces and higher Morse functions induce natural stratifications. In the former, we show that the data of the Jacobi set of a function $f:X \to \mathbb{R}^k$ induces stratifications on $X,\mathbb{R}^k$, and the associated Reeb space, and give conditions under which maps between these three spaces are stratified maps. We then extend this type of construction to the codomain of higher Morse functions, using the singular locus to induce a stratification of which sub-posets are equivalent to multi-parameter filtrations.Comment: v2: Additional examples/figures, Appendix on notions of criticality for PL ma

The Topology ToolKit

This system paper presents the Topology ToolKit (TTK), a software platform designed for topological data analysis in scientific visualization. TTK provides a unified, generic, efficient, and robust implementation of key algorithms for the topological analysis of scalar data, including: critical points, integral lines, persistence diagrams, persistence curves, merge trees, contour trees, Morse-Smale complexes, fiber surfaces, continuous scatterplots, Jacobi sets, Reeb spaces, and more. TTK is easily accessible to end users due to a tight integration with ParaView. It is also easily accessible to developers through a variety of bindings (Python, VTK/C++) for fast prototyping or through direct, dependence-free, C++, to ease integration into pre-existing complex systems. While developing TTK, we faced several algorithmic and software engineering challenges, which we document in this paper. In particular, we present an algorithm for the construction of a discrete gradient that complies to the critical points extracted in the piecewise-linear setting. This algorithm guarantees a combinatorial consistency across the topological abstractions supported by TTK, and importantly, a unified implementation of topological data simplification for multi-scale exploration and analysis. We also present a cached triangulation data structure, that supports time efficient and generic traversals, which self-adjusts its memory usage on demand for input simplicial meshes and which implicitly emulates a triangulation for regular grids with no memory overhead. Finally, we describe an original software architecture, which guarantees memory efficient and direct accesses to TTK features, while still allowing for researchers powerful and easy bindings and extensions. TTK is open source (BSD license) and its code, online documentation and video tutorials are available on TTK's website

Notes on explicit special generic maps into Eulidean spaces whose dimensions are greater than 4

Special generic maps are higher dimensional versions of Morse functions with exactly two singular points, characterizing spheres topologically except 4-dimensional cases and 4-dimensional standard spheres. The class of such maps also contains canonical projections of unit spheres. This class is interesting from the viewpoint of algebraic topology and differential topology of manifolds. These maps have been shown to restrict the topologies and the differentiable structures of the manifolds strongly by Calabi, Saeki and Sakuma before 2010s, and later Nishioka, Wrazidlo and the author. So-called exotic spheres admit no special generic map in considerable cases and homology groups and cohomology rings are shown to be strongly restricted. Moreover, special generic maps into Euclidean spaces whose dimensions are smaller than or equal to 4 have been studied well. The present paper mainly concerns cases where the dimensions of target spaces are larger than or equal to 5.Comment: 11 pages, A short exposition on a special generic map added, this will be improved, after improvement on the content etc. this will be submitted to a refereed journal (when the time comes

An edit distance for Reeb graphs

We consider the problem of assessing the similarity of 3D shapes using Reeb graphs from the standpoint of robustness under perturbations. For this purpose, 3D objects are viewed as spaces endowed with real-valued functions, while the similarity between the resulting Reeb graphs is addressed through a graph edit distance. The cases of smooth functions on manifolds and piecewise linear functions on polyhedra stand out as the most interesting ones. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a general edit distance suitable for comparing Reeb graphs in these settings. This edit distance promises to be useful for applications in 3D object retrieval because of its stability properties in the presence of noise