On homotopy types of Vietoris-Rips complexes of metric gluings (Q2209749)

The Vietoris-Rips complex is a fundamental tool in persistent homology theory or Topological Data Analysis (TDA). This complex can recover topological features of a sample underlying the data. Indeed, it was proved that if the underlying space is a closed Riemannian manifold \(M\), the scale parameter is sufficiently small, and a sample is sufficiently close to \(M\), then the Vietoris-Rips complex of the sample is homotopy equivalent to \(M\) [\textit{J.-C. Hausmann}, Ann. Math. Stud. 138, 175--188 (1995; Zbl 0928.55003); \textit{J. Latschev}, Arch. Math. 77, No. 6, 522--528 (2001; Zbl 1001.53026)]). In this paper, the authors study the Vietoris-Rips complexes of glued metric spaces at all scale parameters. In particular, it is proved that the Vietoris-Rips complex of the wedge sum of two pointed metric spaces \(\mathrm{VR}(X \vee Y;r)\) is homotopy equivalent to the wedge sum of the Vietoris-Rips complexes \(\mathrm{VR}(X;r) \vee \mathrm{VR}(Y;r)\) for all \(r>0\). More generally, the Vietoris-Rips complex of the glued space of two metric spaces along a common isometric subset is studied. These results enable us to compute the persistent homology of a glued space completely. Čech analogies are also studied. As an application, the Vietoris-Rips complexes of glued metric graphs are discussed.