Persistence diagrams (PDs) play a key role in topological data analysis
(TDA), in which they are routinely used to describe topological properties of
complicated shapes. PDs enjoy strong stability properties and have proven their
utility in various learning contexts. They do not, however, live in a space
naturally endowed with a Hilbert structure and are usually compared with
specific distances, such as the bottleneck distance. To incorporate PDs in a
learning pipeline, several kernels have been proposed for PDs with a strong
emphasis on the stability of the RKHS distance w.r.t. perturbations of the PDs.
In this article, we use the Sliced Wasserstein approximation SW of the
Wasserstein distance to define a new kernel for PDs, which is not only provably
stable but also provably discriminative (depending on the number of points in
the PDs) w.r.t. the Wasserstein distance d1 between PDs. We also demonstrate
its practicality, by developing an approximation technique to reduce kernel
computation time, and show that our proposal compares favorably to existing
kernels for PDs on several benchmarks.Comment: Minor modification
