Metric Graph Approximations of Geodesic Spaces

Authors Facundo Mémoli, Osman Berat Okutan, Qing-song Wang

Publication date 14 September 2018

Abstract: A standard result in metric geometry is that every compact geodesic metric space can be approximated arbitrarily well by finite metric graphs in the Gromov-Hausdorff sense. It is well known that the first Betti number of the approximating graphs may blow up as the approximation gets finer. In our work, given a compact geodesic metric space

X

, we define a sequence

(d e l t a_{n}^{X})_{n g e q 0}

of non-negative real numbers by

delta^X_n:=inf {d_{mathrm{GH}}(X,G): G ext{ a finite metric graph, } �eta_1(G)leq n } .

By construction, and the above result, this is a non-increasing sequence with limit

0

. We study this sequence and its rates of decay with

n

. We also identify a precise relationship between the sequence and the first Vietoris-Rips persistence barcode of

X

. Furthermore, we specifically analyze

d e l t a_{0}^{X}

and find upper and lower bounds based on hyperbolicity and other metric invariants. As a consequence of the tools we develop, our work also provides a Gromov-Hausdorff stability result for the Reeb construction on geodesic metric spaces with respect to the function given by distance to a reference point.

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