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Given a map $f:X \to M$ from a topological space $X$ to a metric space $M$, a decorated Reeb space consists of the Reeb space, together with an attribution function whose values recover geometric information lost during the construction of the Reeb space. For example, when $M=\mathbb{R}$ is the real line, the Reeb space is the well-known Reeb graph, and the attributions may consist of persistence diagrams summarizing the level set topology of $f$. In this paper, we introduce decorated Reeb spaces in various flavors and prove that our constructions are Gromov-Hausdorff stable. We also provide results on approximating decorated Reeb spaces from finite samples and leverage these to develop a computational framework for applying these constructions to point cloud data., Comment: V2: Full version of the paper to appear in SOCG 24

This paper employs techniques from metric geometry and optimal transport theory to address questions related to the analysis of functional data on metric or metric-measure spaces, which we refer to as fields. Formally, fields are viewed as 1-Lipschitz mappings between Polish metric spaces with the domain possibly equipped with a Borel probability measure. We introduce field analogues of the Gromov-Hausdorff, Gromov-Prokhorov, and Gromov-Wasserstein distances, investigate their main properties and provide a characterization of the Gromov-Hausdorff distance in terms of isometric embeddings in a Urysohn universal field. Adapting the notion of distance matrices to fields, we formulate a discrete model, obtain an empirical estimation result that provides a theoretical basis for its use in functional data analysis, and prove a field analogue of Gromov's Reconstruction Theorem. We also investigate field versions of the Vietoris-Rips and neighborhood (or offset) filtrations and prove that they are stable with respect to appropriate metrics., Comment: Some missing references are added. An early version of this manuscript was posted to arXiv as arXiv:2208.04782

In this paper we introduce a novel family of attributed graphs for the purpose of shape discrimination. Our graphs typically arise from variations on the Mapper graph construction, which is an approximation of the Reeb graph for point cloud data. Our attributions enrich these constructions with (persistent) homology in ways that are provably stable, thereby recording extra topological information that is typically lost in these graph constructions. We provide experiments which illustrate the use of these invariants for shape representation and classification. In particular, we obtain competitive shape classification results when using our topologically attributed graphs as inputs to a simple graph neural network classifier.

We introduce decorated mapper graphs as a generalization of mapper graphs capable of capturing more topological information of a data set. A decorated mapper graph can be viewed as a discrete approximation of the cellular Leray cosheaf over the Reeb graph. We establish a theoretical foundation for this construction by showing that the cellular Leray cosheaf with respect to a sequence of covers converges to the actual Leray cosheaf as the resolution of the covers goes to zero.

This paper addresses problems in functional metric geometry that arise in the study of data such as signals recorded on geometric domains or on the nodes of weighted networks. Datasets comprising such objects arise in many domains of scientific and practical interest. For example, $f$ could represent a functional magnetic resonance image, or the nodes of a social network labeled with attributes or preferences, where the underlying metric structure is given by the shortest path distance, commute distance, or diffusion distance. Formally, these may be viewed as functions defined on metric spaces, sometimes equipped with additional structure such as a probability measure, in which case the domain is referred to as a metric-measure space, or simply $mm$-space. Our primary goal is threefold: (i) to develop metrics that allow us to model and quantify variation in functional data, possibly with distinct domains; (ii) to investigate principled empirical estimations of these metrics; (iii) to construct a universal function that ``contains'' all functions whose domains and ranges are Polish (separable and complete metric) spaces, assuming Lipschitz regularity. The latter is much in the spirit of constructing universal spaces for structural data (metric spaces) whose investigation dates back to the early 20th century and are of classical interest in metric geometry., Comment: 23 pages

This paper introduces decorated merge trees (DMTs) as a novel invariant for persistent spaces. DMTs combine both $\pi_0$ and $H_n$ information into a single data structure that distinguishes filtrations that merge trees and persistent homology cannot distinguish alone. Three variants on DMTs, which emphasize category theory, representation theory and persistence barcodes, respectively, offer different advantages in terms of theory and computation. Two notions of distance -- an interleaving distance and bottleneck distance -- for DMTs are defined and a hierarchy of stability results that both refine and generalize existing stability results is proved here. To overcome some of the computational complexity inherent in these distances, we provide a novel use of Gromov-Wasserstein couplings to compute optimal merge tree alignments for a combinatorial version of our interleaving distance which can be tractably estimated. We introduce computational frameworks for generating, visualizing and comparing decorated merge trees derived from synthetic and real data. Example applications include comparison of point clouds, interpretation of persistent homology of sliding window embeddings of time series, visualization of topological features in segmented brain tumor images and topology-driven graph alignment., Comment: Update: streamlined and improved exposition

In the applied algebraic topology community, the persistent homology induced by the Vietoris-Rips simplicial filtration is a standard method for capturing topological information from metric spaces. In this paper, we consider a different, more geometric way of generating persistent homology of metric spaces which arises by first embedding a given metric space into a larger space and then considering thickenings of the original space inside this ambient metric space. In the course of doing this, we construct an appropriate category for studying this notion of persistent homology and show that, in a category theoretic sense, the standard persistent homology of the Vietoris-Rips filtration is isomorphic to our geometric persistent homology provided that the ambient metric space satisfies a property called injectivity. As an application of this isomorphism result we are able to precisely characterize the type of intervals that appear in the persistence barcodes of the Vietoris-Rips filtration of any compact metric space and also to give succinct proofs of the characterization of the persistent homology of products and metric gluings of metric spaces. Our results also permit proving several bounds on the length of intervals in the Vietoris-Rips barcode by other metric invariants. Finally, as another application, we connect this geometric persistent homology to the notion of filling radius of manifolds introduced by Gromov \cite{G07} and show some consequences related to (1) the homotopy type of the Vietoris-Rips complexes of spheres which follow from work of M.~Katz and (2) characterization (rigidity) results for spheres in terms of their Vietoris-Rips persistence barcodes which follow from work of F.~Wilhelm., Comment: We added Remark 9.8

We study the question of approximating a compact geodesic metric space by metric graphs satisfying a uniform upper bound on their first Betti number. We prove that, up to a suitable multiplicative constant, Reeb graphs of distance functions to a point provide optimal approximation in the Gromov-Hausdsorff sense., Comment: Omitted references are added

We introduce a new invariant defined on the vertices of a given filtered simplicial complex, called codensity, which controls the impact of removing vertices on persistent homology. We achieve this control through the use of an interleaving type of distance between fitered simplicial complexes. We study the special case of Vietoris-Rips filtrations and show that our bounds offer a significant improvement over the immediate bounds coming from considerations related to the Gromov-Hausdorff distance. Based on these ideas we give an iterative method for the practical simplification of filtered simplicial complexes. As a byproduct of our analysis we identify a notion of core of a filtered simplicial complex which admits the interpretation as a minimalistic simplicial filtration which retains all the persistent homology information., Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures

Given a metric space $X$ and a function $f: X \to \mathbb{R}$, the Reeb construction gives metric a space $X_f$ together with a quotient map $X \to X_f$. Under suitable conditions $X_f$ becomes a metric graph and can therefore be used as a graph approximation to $X$. The Gromov-Hausdorff distance from $X_f$ to $X$ is bounded by the half of the metric distortion of the quotient map. In this paper we consider the case where $X$ is a compact Riemannian manifold and $f$ is an excellent Morse function. In this case we provide bounds on the distortion of the quotient map which involve the first Betti number of the original space and a novel invariant which we call thickness., Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures

A well known result in the analysis of finite metric spaces due to Gromov says that given any $(X,d_X)$ there exists a \emph{tree metric} $t_X$ on $X$ such that $\|d_X-t_X\|_\infty$ is bounded above by twice $\mathrm{hyp}(X)\cdot \log(2\,|X|)$. Here $\mathrm{hyp}(X)$ is the \emph{hyperbolicity} of $X$, a quantity that measures the \emph{treeness} of $4$-tuples of points in $X$. This bound is known to be asymptotically tight. We improve this bound by restricting ourselves to metric spaces arising from filtered posets. By doing so we are able to replace the cardinality appearing in Gromov's bound by a certain poset theoretic invariant (the maximum length of fences in the poset) which can be much smaller thus significantly improving the approximation bound. The setting of metric spaces arising from posets is rich: For example, save for the possible addition of new vertices, every finite metric graph can be induced from a filtered poset. Since every finite metric space can be isometrically embedded into a finite metric graph, our ideas are applicable to finite metric spaces as well. At the core of our results lies the adaptation of the Reeb graph and Reeb tree constructions and the concept of hyperbolicity to the setting of posets, which we use to formulate and prove a tree approximation result for any filtered poset., Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures

A classical conjecture in transformation group theory states that if $G=(\bbZ/p)^r$ acts freely on a product of $k$ spheres $S^{n_1} \times ... \times S^{n_k}$, then $r\leq k$. We prove this conjecture in the case where the average of the dimensions ${n_i}$ is large compared to the differences $|n_i-n_j|$ between the dimensions., Comment: 13 pages