Topological and metric properties of spaces of generalized persistence diagrams

TL;DR

This paper explores the topological and metric properties of spaces of persistence diagrams, revealing new insights into their structure, compactness, and embeddability, with implications for topological data analysis.

Contribution

It provides new theoretical results on the topology, metric properties, and embeddability of spaces of persistence diagrams, including conditions for optimal matchings.

Findings

Spaces of persistence diagrams are not locally compact under mild conditions.

If the underlying space is σ-compact, so is the space of diagrams.

Certain spaces of diagrams are not hemicompact and are non-metrizable.

Abstract

Motivated by persistent homology and topological data analysis, we consider formal sums on a metric space with a distinguished subset. These formal sums, which we call persistence diagrams, have a canonical 1-parameter family of metrics called Wasserstein distances. We study the topological and metric properties of these spaces. Some of our results are new even in the case of persistence diagrams on the half-plane. Under mild conditions, no persistence diagram has a compact neighborhood. If the underlying metric space is $\sigma$-compact then so is the space of persistence diagrams. However, under mild conditions, the space of persistence diagrams is not hemicompact and the space of functions from this space to a topological space is not metrizable. Spaces of persistence diagrams inherit completeness and separability from the underlying metric space. Some spaces of persistence diagrams inherit being path connected, being a length space, and being a geodesic space, but others do not. We give criteria for a set of persistence diagrams to be totally bounded and relatively compact. We also study the curvature and dimension of spaces of persistence diagrams and their embeddability into a Hilbert space. As an important technical step, which is of independent interest, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of optimal matchings of persistence diagrams.