Pruning vineyards: updating barcodes by removing simplices

Abstract

The barcode computation of a filtration can be computationally expensive. Therefore, it is useful to have methods to update a barcode if the associated filtration undergoes small changes, such as changing the entrance order, or adding and removing simplices. There is already a rich literature on how to efficiently update a barcode in the first two cases, but the latter case has not been investigated yet. In this work, we provide an algorithm to update a reduced boundary matrix when simplices are removed. We show that the complexity of this algorithm is lower than recomputing the barcode from scratch, with both theoretical and experimental methods.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure