Continuation of point clouds via persistence diagrams

Abstract

In this paper, we present a mathematical and algorithmic framework for the continuation of point clouds by persistence diagrams. A key property used in the method is that the persistence map, which assigns a persistence diagram to a point cloud, is differentiable. This allows us to apply the Newton–Raphson continuation method in this setting. Given an original point cloud P, its persistence diagram D, and a target persistence diagram D′, we gradually move from D to D′, by successively computing intermediate point clouds until we finally find a point cloud P′ having D′ as its persistence diagram. Our method can be applied to a wide variety of situations in topological data analysis where it is necessary to solve an inverse problem, from persistence diagrams to point cloud data.