Vietoris-Rips Complexes of Regular Polygons

Authors Henry Adams, Samir Chowdhury, Adam Quinn Jaffe, Bonginkosi Sibanda

Publication date 28 July 2018

Abstract: Persistent homology has emerged as a novel tool for data analysis in the past two decades. However, there are still very few shapes or even manifolds whose persistent homology barcodes (say of the Vietoris-Rips complex) are fully known. Towards this direction, let

P_{n}

be the boundary of a regular polygon in the plane with

n

sides; we describe the homotopy types of Vietoris-Rips complexes of

P_{n}

. Indeed, when

n = (k + 1)!!

is an odd double factorial, we provide a complete characterization of the homotopy types and persistent homology of the Vietoris-Rips complexes of

P_{n}

up to a scale parameter

r_{n}

, where

r_{n}

approaches the diameter of

P_{n}

as

n o i n f t y

. Surprisingly, these homotopy types include spheres of all dimensions. Roughly speaking, the number of higher-dimensional spheres appearing is linked to the number of equilateral (but not necessarily equiangular) stars that can be inscribed into

P_{n}

. As our main tool we use the recently-developed theory of cyclic graphs and winding fractions. Furthermore, we show that the Vietoris-Rips complex of an arbitrarily dense subset of

P_{n}

need not be homotopy equivalent to the Vietoris-Rips complex of

P_{n}

itself, and indeed, these two complexes can have different homology groups in arbitrarily high dimensions. As an application of our results, we provide a lower bound on the Gromov-Hausdorff distance between

P_{n}

and the circle.

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