12,144 research outputs found
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
Representability of algebraic topology for biomolecules in machine learning based scoring and virtual screening
This work introduces a number of algebraic topology approaches, such as
multicomponent persistent homology, multi-level persistent homology and
electrostatic persistence for the representation, characterization, and
description of small molecules and biomolecular complexes. Multicomponent
persistent homology retains critical chemical and biological information during
the topological simplification of biomolecular geometric complexity.
Multi-level persistent homology enables a tailored topological description of
inter- and/or intra-molecular interactions of interest. Electrostatic
persistence incorporates partial charge information into topological
invariants. These topological methods are paired with Wasserstein distance to
characterize similarities between molecules and are further integrated with a
variety of machine learning algorithms, including k-nearest neighbors, ensemble
of trees, and deep convolutional neural networks, to manifest their descriptive
and predictive powers for chemical and biological problems. Extensive numerical
experiments involving more than 4,000 protein-ligand complexes from the PDBBind
database and near 100,000 ligands and decoys in the DUD database are performed
to test respectively the scoring power and the virtual screening power of the
proposed topological approaches. It is demonstrated that the present approaches
outperform the modern machine learning based methods in protein-ligand binding
affinity predictions and ligand-decoy discrimination
Combinatorial Gradient Fields for 2D Images with Empirically Convergent Separatrices
This paper proposes an efficient probabilistic method that computes
combinatorial gradient fields for two dimensional image data. In contrast to
existing algorithms, this approach yields a geometric Morse-Smale complex that
converges almost surely to its continuous counterpart when the image resolution
is increased. This approach is motivated using basic ideas from probability
theory and builds upon an algorithm from discrete Morse theory with a strong
mathematical foundation. While a formal proof is only hinted at, we do provide
a thorough numerical evaluation of our method and compare it to established
algorithms.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure
Methodological Fundamentalism: or why Battermanâs Different Notions of âFundamentalismâ may not make a Difference
I argue that the distinctions Robert Batterman (2004) presents between âepistemically fundamentalâ versus âontologically fundamentalâ theoretical approaches can be subsumed by methodologically fundamental procedures. I characterize precisely what is meant by a methodologically fundamental procedure, which involves, among other things, the use of multilinear graded algebras in a theoryâs formalism. For example, one such class of algebras I discuss are the Clifford (or Geometric) algebras. Aside from their being touted by many as a âunified mathematical language for physics,â (Hestenes (1984, 1986) Lasenby, et. al. (2000)) Finkelstein (2001, 2004) and others have demonstrated that the techniques of multilinear algebraic âexpansion and contractionâ exhibit a robust regularizablilty. That is to say, such regularization has been demonstrated to remove singularities, which would otherwise appear in standard field-theoretic, mathematical characterizations of a physical theory. I claim that the existence of such methodologically fundamental procedures calls into question one of Battermanâs central points, that âour explanatory physical practice demands that we appeal essentially to (infinite) idealizationsâ (2003, 7) exhibited, for example, by singularities in the case of modeling critical phenomena, like fluid droplet formation. By way of counterexample, in the field of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), I discuss the work of Mann & Rockwood (2003) and Gerik Scheuermann, (2002). In the concluding section, I sketch a methodologically fundamental procedure potentially applicable to more general classes of critical phenomena appearing in fluid dynamics
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