Title
A roadmap for the computation of persistent homology
Abstract
Persistent homology (PH) is a method used in topological data analysis (TDA) to study qualitative features of data that persist across multiple scales. It is robust to perturbations of input data, independent of dimensions and coordinates, and provides a compact representation of the qualitative features of the input. The computation of PH is an open area with numerous important and fascinating challenges. The field of PH computation is evolving rapidly, and new algorithms and software implementations are being updated and released at a rapid pace. The purposes of our article are to (1) introduce theory and computational methods for PH to a broad range of computational scientists and (2) provide benchmarks of state-of-the-art implementations for the computation of PH. We give a friendly introduction to PH, navigate the pipeline for the computation of PH with an eye towards applications, and use a range of synthetic and real-world data sets to evaluate currently available open-source implementations for the computation of PH. Based on our benchmarking, we indicate which algorithms and implementations are best suited to different types of data sets. In an accompanying tutorial, we provide guidelines for the computation of PH. We make publicly available all scripts that we wrote for the tutorial, and we make available the processed version of the data sets used in the benchmarking.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1140/epjds/s13688-017-0109-5
EPJ Data Sci.
Keywords
Field
DocType
persistent homology,topological data analysis,point-cloud data,networks
Topological data analysis,Data mining,Data set,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Persistent homology,Data type,Point cloud,Benchmarking,Computation,Scripting language
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
abs/1506.08903
1
2193-1127
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
27
1.51
59
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
nina otter1322.79
Mason A. Porter274866.14
Ulrike Tillmann3322.79
Peter Grindrod48810.05
Heather A. Harrington5425.46