Quantifying the Structural Stability of Simplicial Homology

Abstract

Simplicial complexes are generalizations of classical graphs. Their homology groups are widely used to characterize the structure and the topology of data in e.g. chemistry, neuroscience, and transportation networks. In this work we assume we are given a simplicial complex and that we can act on its underlying graph, formed by the set of 1-simplices, and we investigate the stability of its homology with respect to perturbations of the edges in such graph. Precisely, exploiting the isomorphism between the homology groups and the higher-order Laplacian operators, we propose a numerical method to compute the smallest graph perturbation sufficient to change the dimension of the simplex’s Hodge homology. Our approach is based on a matrix nearness problem formulated as a matrix differential equation, which requires an appropriate weighting and normalizing procedure for the boundary operators acting on the Hodge algebra’s homology groups. We develop a bilevel optimization procedure suitable for the formulated matrix nearness problem and illustrate the method’s performance on a variety of synthetic quasi-triangulation datasets and real-world transportation networks.