Rips filtrations for quasimetric spaces and asymmetric functions with stability results

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Publication:2279049



Abstract: The Rips filtration over a finite metric space and its corresponding persistent homology are prominent methods in TDA to summarise the shape of data. Crucial to their use is the bottleneck stability result. A generalisation of the Rips filtration to any symmetric function f:XimesXomathbbR was defined by Chazal, De Silva and Oudot, and they showed it was stable with respect to the correspondence distortion distance. Allowing asymmetry, we consider four different persistence modules. The first method is through symmetrisation. For ain[0,1] we can construct a symmetric function syma(f)(x,y)=amind(x,y),d(y,x)+(1−a)maxd(x,y),d(y,x). We can then follow the apply the standard theory for symmetric functions and get stability as a corollary. The second method is to construct a filtration of ordered tuple complexes where tuple (x0,x2,ldotsxp)inRipsdir(X)t if d(xi,xj)leqt for all ileqj. These two methods have the same persistent homology as the standard Rips filtration when applied to a metric space, or more generally to a symmetric function. We consider two constructions using a filtration of directed graphs. We have directed graphs D(X)t, where directed edges xoy are included in D(X)t whenever maxf(x,y),f(x,x),f(y,y)leqt. From this we construct a preorder where xleqy if there is a path from x to y in D(X)t. We build persistence modules using the strongly connected components of the graphs D(X)t, which are the equivalence classes of the associated preorders. We consider persistence modules using a generalisation of poset topology to preorders. The Gromov-Hausdorff distance can be extended as a correspondence distortion distance to set-function pairs. We prove that all these new constructions enjoy the same stability results.


The stability of persistent homology is well-established for metric spaces. Roughly speaking, it says that if two metric spaces are close to each other, then their persistent homology barcodes are also close to each other. This is a desirable property to have in data analysis contexts, where small perturbations of measurements are to be expected, and should not drastically alter one's analysis. This paper studies the stability of persistent homology in the context of non-symmetric metric spaces, where the directed distance from point \(x\) to \(x'\) need not equal the directed distance from \(x'\) to \(x\). In more detail, let \(X\) be a set equipped with a function \(d\colon X\times X\to \mathbb{R}\). We say that \(d\) is \textit{symmetric} if \(d(x,x')=d(x',x)\) for all \(x,x'\in X\). One can think of a symmetric function \(d\) as a metric, even though it need not satisfy the triangle inequality. For \(d\) symmetric, the Vietoris-Rips complex of \(d\) at scale \(r\) has \(X\) as its vertex set, and a finite subset \(\sigma \subseteq X\) as a simplex if \(d(x,x')\le r\) for all \(x,x'\in \sigma\). If \(d\) and \(\tilde{d}\) are two symmetric functions, then the \textit{stability theorem} in persistent homology states that the interleaving distance between the persistent homology modules of the Vietoris-Rips complexes for \(d\) and \(\tilde{d}\) is bounded from above by twice their Gromov-Hausdorff distance. This paper considers four different adaptations of the above paragraph in the asymmetric setting, where \(d\colon X\times X\to \mathbb{R}\) is no longer assumed to be symmetric. The first two adaptations, roughly speaking, proceed by producing a symmetric function from an asymmetric one, and then applying the standard stability theorem. The third adaptation instead constructs an ordered tuple complex, or a directed complex, from the asymmetric function \(d\). The authors produce an analogous stability theorem bounding the persistent homology modules of the directed Vietoris-Rips complexes by a directed analogue of the Gromov-Hausdorff distance. The fourth adaptation functions in the setting of a generalization of poset topologies to preorders. These last two adaptations cannot be recovered via symmetrized techniques.











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