Filtrations induced by continuous functions (Q390412)

Persistent homology characterizes the way in which the homology classes related to the filtration of a topological space are born and die with the filtration. The filtration of the space can arise in two ways, one is as an ordered collection of subsets of the space and the other is from a continuous function from the space into \({\mathbb R}^{n}\). This paper shows that every compact and stable \(1\)-dimensional filtration on a compact metric space is induced by a continuous function. The notion of stability for a filtration requires that the filtration exhibits certain continuity properties. The authors provide examples to show that the conditions are necessary.