Homology algorithm based on acyclic subspace

Abstract

We present a new reduction algorithm for the efficient computation of the homology of a cubical set. The algorithm is based on constructing a possibly large acyclic subspace, and then computing the relative homology instead of the plain homology. We show that the construction of acyclic subspace may be performed in linear time. This significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be processed in the algebraic way, and in practice it proves itself to be significantly more efficient than other available cubical homology algorithms.