Persistent homology is a multiscale method for analyzing the shape of sets
and functions from point cloud data arising from an unknown distribution
supported on those sets. When the size of the sample is large, direct
computation of the persistent homology is prohibitive due to the combinatorial
nature of the existing algorithms. We propose to compute the persistent
homology of several subsamples of the data and then combine the resulting
estimates. We study the risk of two estimators and we prove that the
subsampling approach carries stable topological information while achieving a
great reduction in computational complexity