Persistence-Based Statistics for Detecting Structural Changes in High-Dimensional Point Clouds

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new nonparametric, persistence-based statistical framework for detecting structural changes in high-dimensional point clouds, with proven stability and applicability demonstrated through numerical experiments.

Contribution

It develops a novel, statistically rigorous method combining persistence landscapes and Jensen-Shannon divergence for change detection in high-dimensional data.

Findings

Established moment bounds and tightness for persistence statistics

Proposed a stable, scale- and shift-invariant measure for change detection

Validated the method with numerical experiments on governance data

Abstract

We study the probabilistic behavior of persistence-based statistics and propose a novel nonparametric framework for detecting structural changes in high-dimensional random point clouds. We establish moment bounds and tightness results for classical persistence statistics-total and maximum persistence-under general distributions, with explicit variance-scaling behavior derived for Gaussian mixture models. Building on these results, we introduce a bounded and normalized statistic based on persistence landscapes combined with the Jensen-Shannon divergence, and we prove its Holder continuity with respect to perturbations of the input point clouds. The resulting measure is stable, scale- and shift-invariant, and well suited for finite-sample nonparametric inference via permutation testing. An illustrative numerical study using dynamic attribute vectors from decentralized governance data demonstrates the practical applicability of the proposed method. Overall, this work provides a statistically rigorous and computationally stable approach to change-point detection in complex, high-dimensional data.