Detecting the dimension of a hidden manifold from a point sample has become
an important problem in the current data-driven era. Indeed, estimating the
shape dimension is often the first step in studying the processes or phenomena
associated to the data. Among the many dimension detection algorithms proposed
in various fields, a few can provide theoretical guarantee on the correctness
of the estimated dimension. However, the correctness usually requires certain
regularity of the input: the input points are either uniformly randomly sampled
in a statistical setting, or they form the so-called
(ε,δ)-sample which can be neither too dense nor too sparse.
Here, we propose a purely topological technique to detect dimensions. Our
algorithm is provably correct and works under a more relaxed sampling
condition: we do not require uniformity, and we also allow Hausdorff noise. Our
approach detects dimension by determining local homology. The computation of
this topological structure is much less sensitive to the local distribution of
points, which leads to the relaxation of the sampling conditions. Furthermore,
by leveraging various developments in computational topology, we show that this
local homology at a point z can be computed \emph{exactly} for manifolds
using Vietoris-Rips complexes whose vertices are confined within a local
neighborhood of z. We implement our algorithm and demonstrate the accuracy
and robustness of our method using both synthetic and real data sets