An emerging method for data analysis is called Topological Data Analysis (TDA). TDA is based in the mathematical field of topology and examines the properties of spaces under continuous deformation. One of the key tools used for TDA is called persistent homology which considers the connectivity of points in a d-dimensional point cloud at different spatial resolutions to identify topological properties (holes, loops, and voids) in the space. Persistent homology then classifies the topological features by their persistence through the range of spatial connectivity. Unfortunately the memory and run-time complexity of computing persistent homology is exponential and current tools can only process a few thousand points in R3. Fortunately, the use of data reduction techniques enables persistent homology to be applied to much larger point clouds. Techniques to reduce the data range from random sampling of points to clustering the data and using the cluster centroids as the reduced data. While several data reduction approaches appear to preserve the large topological features present in the original point cloud, no systematic study comparing the efficacy of different data clustering techniques in preserving the persistent homology results has been performed. This paper explores the question of topology preserving data reductions and describes formally when and how topological features can be mischaracterized or lost by data reduction techniques. The paper also performs an experimental assessment of data reduction techniques and resilient effects on the persistent homology. In particular, data reduction by random selection is compared to cluster centroids extracted from different data clustering algorithms.
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Cluster-based Data Reduction for Persistent Homology
Persistent homology is used for computing topological features of a space at different spatial resolutions. It is one of the main tools from computational topology that is applied to the problems of data analysis. Despite several attempts to reduce its complexity, persistent homology remains expensive in both time and space. These limits are such that the largest data sets to which the method can be applied have the number of points of the order of thousands in R^3. This paper explores a technique intended to reduce the number of data points while preserving the salient topological features of the data. The proposed technique enables the computation of persistent homology on a reduced version of the original input data without affecting significant components of the output. Since the run time of persistent homology is exponential in the number of data points, the proposed data reduction method facilitates the computation in a fraction of the time required for the original data. Moreover, the data reduction method can be combined with any existing technique that simplifies the computation of persistent homology. The data reduction is performed by creating small groups of \emph{similar} data points, called nano-clusters, and then replacing the points within each nano-cluster with its cluster center. The persistence homology of the reduced data differs from that of the original data by an amount bounded by the radius of the nano-clusters. The theoretical analysis is backed by experimental results showing that persistent homology is preserved by the proposed data reduction technique.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1440420
- PAR ID:
- 10193705
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 IEEE International Conference on Big Data
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 327 to 334
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2018.8622440
