Persistent homology of time-dependent functional networks constructed from coupled time series

TL;DR

This paper applies persistent homology to analyze time-dependent functional networks from coupled oscillators and fMRI data, revealing insights into network dynamics and synchronization patterns during motor learning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of persistent homology with weight rank clique filtration and persistence landscapes to study functional networks from time series data.

Findings

Persistent homology detects changes in synchronization over time.

Topological features relate to community structure and brain region interactions.

Most network loop changes occur on the second day of motor learning.

Abstract

We use topological data analysis to study "functional networks" that we construct from time-series data from both experimental and synthetic sources. We use persistent homology with a weight rank clique filtration to gain insights into these functional networks, and we use persistence landscapes to interpret our results. Our first example uses time-series output from networks of coupled Kuramoto oscillators. Our second example consists of biological data in the form of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data that was acquired from human subjects during a simple motor-learning task in which subjects were monitored on three days in a five-day period. With these examples, we demonstrate that (1) using persistent homology to study functional networks provides fascinating insights into their properties and (2) the position of the features in a filtration can sometimes play a more vital role than persistence in the interpretation of topological features, even though conventionally the latter is used to distinguish between signal and noise. We find that persistent homology can detect differences in synchronization patterns in our data sets over time, giving insight both on changes in community structure in the networks and on increased synchronization between brain regions that form loops in a functional network during motor learning. For the motor-learning data, persistence landscapes also reveal that on average the majority of changes in the network loops take place on the second of the three days of the learning process.