Graph induced complex on point data

Abstract

The efficiency of extracting topological information from point data depends largely on the complex that is built on top of the data points. From a computational viewpoint, the favored complexes for this purpose have so far been Vietoris–Rips and witness complexes. While the Vietoris–Rips complex is simple to compute and is a good vehicle for extracting topology of sampled spaces, its size becomes prohibitively large for reasonable computations. The witness complex on the other hand enjoys a smaller size because of a subsampling, but fails to capture the topology in high dimensions unless imposed with extra structure. We investigate a complex called the graph induced complex that, to some extent, enjoys the advantages of both. It works on a subsample but still retains the power of capturing the topology as the Vietoris–Rips complex. It only needs a graph connecting the original sample points from which it builds a complex on the subsample thus taming the size considerably. We show that, using the graph induced complex one can (i) infer the one dimensional homology of a manifold from a lean subsample, (ii) reconstruct a surface in three dimensions from a sparse subsample without computing Delaunay triangulations, (iii) infer the persistent homology groups of compact sets from a sufficiently dense sample. We provide experimental evidences in support of our theory.