Computing the multicover bifiltration (Q6174807)

This paper describes a method of computing properties of a bifiltration. Bifiltrations are natural extensions of the standard filtration in TDA. They apply this to some data sets, and look at natural generalizations of the 1-D case of the offset filtration (e.g. Čech). They introduce the bifiltrations ``Cov'', ``S-Del'', ``S-Rhomb'', and ``Rhomb'' and show that these bifiltrations are weakly equivalent. The authors also discuss the size of the bifiltrations, showing that the size bound is not very large given certain conditions (e.g. points being in general position). In particular, this beats the exponential bound in previous work. They then discuss an algorithm that computes ``Rhomb'' (the rhomboid bifiltration), also providing code to do the computation (currently limited to 2 and 3 dimensions). The code is easily generalizable to higher dimensions, but it becomes computationally expensive. They conclude with some experiments performed on data in \(\mathbb{R}^2\) and \(\mathbb{R}^3\) (e.g. points sampled uniformly at random from the unit interval \([0,1]^2\) or \([0,1]^3\), or a disk, or an annulus). They get promising results, but still need to address how to deal with larger data sets. Instead of truncation, they suggest an inductive process or a coarsened biltration.