Pl\"ucker Coordinates of the best-fit Stiefel Tropical Linear Space to a Mixture of Gaussian Distributions

In this research, we investigate a tropical principal component analysis (PCA) as a best-fit Stiefel tropical linear space to a given sample over the tropical projective torus for its dimensionality reduction and visualization. Especially, we characterize the best-fit Stiefel tropical linear space to a sample generated from a mixture of Gaussian distributions as the variances of the Gaussians go to zero. For a single Gaussian distribution, we show that the sum of residuals in terms of the tropical metric with the max-plus algebra over a given sample to a fitted Stiefel tropical linear space converges to zero by giving an upper bound for its convergence rate. Meanwhile, for a mixtures of Gaussian distribution, we show that the best-fit tropical linear space can be determined uniquely when we send variances to zero. We briefly consider the best-fit topical polynomial as an extension for the mixture of more than two Gaussians over the tropical projective space of dimension three. We show some geometric properties of these tropical linear spaces and polynomials.Comment: To appear in Information Geometr

Tropical Principal Component Analysis and its Application to Phylogenetics

Principal component analysis is a widely-used method for the dimensionality reduction of a given data set in a high-dimensional Euclidean space. Here we define and analyze two analogues of principal component analysis in the setting of tropical geometry. In one approach, we study the Stiefel tropical linear space of fixed dimension closest to the data points in the tropical projective torus; in the other approach, we consider the tropical polytope with a fixed number of vertices closest to the data points. We then give approximative algorithms for both approaches and apply them to phylogenetics, testing the methods on simulated phylogenetic data and on an empirical dataset of Apicomplexa genomes.Comment: 28 page

A module-theoretic approach to matroids

Speyer recognized that matroids encode the same data as a special class of tropical linear spaces and Shaw interpreted tropically certain basic matroid constructions; additionally, Frenk developed the perspective of tropical linear spaces as modules over an idempotent semifield. All together, this provides bridges between the combinatorics of matroids, the algebra of idempotent modules, and the geometry of tropical linear spaces. The goal of this paper is to strengthen and expand these bridges by systematically developing the idempotent module theory of matroids. Applications include a geometric interpretation of strong matroid maps and the factorization theorem; a generalized notion of strong matroid maps, via an embedding of the category of matroids into a category of module homomorphisms; a monotonicity property for the stable sum and stable intersection of tropical linear spaces; a novel perspective of fundamental transversal matroids; and a tropical analogue of reduced row echelon form.Comment: 22 pages; v3 minor corrections/clarifications; to appear in JPA

Presentations of transversal valuated matroids

Once this article is published by the JLMS, the Elements version will need to bear a statement of the following form: "This is the accepted version of the following article: FULL CITE, which has been published in final form at [Link to final article]"Once this article is published by the JLMS, the Elements version will need to bear a statement of the following form: "This is the accepted version of the following article: FULL CITE, which has been published in final form at [Link to final article]