Describing topology on the set of persistence diagrams (Q2216679)

Persistence diagrams are the output of persistent homology, capturing the lifetime of homological features in a filtration of spaces, often represented as simplicial complexes. A large part of persistence, both theoretically and in applications, concerns persistence diagrams and therefore it is of interest and of importance to understand the space of them. Foundational structure of the space of persistence diagrams is that it is a metric space with the bottleneck distance. This paper shows that the space of persistence diagrams is homeomorphic to a pre-Hilbert space of finitary sequences \(\ell_f^2\), or square-summable sequences \((x_i)_{i=0}^\infty\) such that \(x_i \ne 0\) for only finitely many \(i\). The main theorem of the paper, cited above, is interesting in the context of recent results showing that the space of persistence diagrams does not even coarsely embed into a Hilbert space [\textit{P. Bubenik} and \textit{A. Wagner}, J. Appl. Comput. Topol. 4, No. 3, 339--351 (2020; Zbl 1455.55006)]. Beyond the main theorem, the paper contains some interesting topological details, such as representing persistence diagrams as elements of the infinite symmetric power \(SP^\infty(\hat{X}/\Delta,\ast)\), where \(\hat{X}=\{(x,y) \in \mathbb{R}^2_+ \ | \ x \leq y\}\) is the half-plane above the diagonal \(\Delta = \{(x,y) \in \mathbb{R}^2_+ \ | \ x = y\}\), \(\ast\) is the equivalence class of \(\Delta\), and \(SP^n(X)\) is the orbit space of the action of the symmetric group on \(X^n\) by permutation of coordinates. A typical point of \(SP^\infty(X,\ast)\) is then denoted as \([x_1,\dots,x_n,\ast,\ast,\dots]\), where \([x_1,\dots,x_n]\) means the orbit containing \((x_1,\dots,x_n) \in X^n\).