Towards Stratification Learning through Homology Inference

A topological approach to stratification learning is developed for point cloud data drawn from a stratified space. Given such data, our objective is to infer which points belong to the same strata. First we define a multi-scale notion of a stratified space, giving a stratification for each radius level. We then use methods derived from kernel and cokernel persistent homology to cluster the data points into different strata, and we prove a result which guarantees the correctness of our clustering, given certain topological conditions; some geometric intuition for these topological conditions is also provided. Our correctness result is then given a probabilistic flavor: we give bounds on the minimum number of sample points required to infer, with probability, which points belong to the same strata. Finally, we give an explicit algorithm for the clustering, prove its correctness, and apply it to some simulated data.Comment: 48 page

Homology and Robustness of Level and Interlevel Sets

Given a function f: \Xspace \to \Rspace on a topological space, we consider the preimages of intervals and their homology groups and show how to read the ranks of these groups from the extended persistence diagram of $f$. In addition, we quantify the robustness of the homology classes under perturbations of $f$ using well groups, and we show how to read the ranks of these groups from the same extended persistence diagram. The special case \Xspace = \Rspace^3 has ramifications in the fields of medical imaging and scientific visualization

Computing robustness and persistence for images

We are interested in 3-dimensional images given as arrays of voxels with intensity values. Extending these values to acontinuous function, we study the robustness of homology classes in its level and interlevel sets, that is, the amount of perturbationneeded to destroy these classes. The structure of the homology classes and their robustness, over all level and interlevel sets, can bevisualized by a triangular diagram of dots obtained by computing the extended persistence of the function. We give a fast hierarchicalalgorithm using the dual complexes of oct-tree approximations of the function. In addition, we show that for balanced oct-trees, thedual complexes are geometrically realized in $R^3$ and can thus be used to construct level and interlevel sets. We apply these tools tostudy 3-dimensional images of plant root systems