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While collapsibility of CW complexes dates back to the 1930s, collapsibility of directed Euclidean cubical complexes has not been well studied to date. The classical definition of collapsibility involves certain conditions on pairs of cells of the complex. The direction of the space can be taken into account by requiring that the past links of vertices remain homotopy equivalent after collapsing. We call this type of collapse a link-preserving directed collapse. In the undirected setting, pairs of cells are removed that create a deformation retract. In the directed setting, topological properties---in particular, properties of spaces of directed paths---are not always preserved. In this paper, we give computationally simple conditions for preserving the topology of past links. Furthermore, we give conditions for when link-preserving directed collapses preserve the contractability and connectedness of spaces of directed paths. Throughout, we provide illustrative examples. 

Topological Data Analysis (TDA) studies the “shape” of data. A common topological descriptor is the persistence diagram, which encodes topological features in a topological space at different scales. Turner, Mukherjee, and Boyer showed that one can reconstruct a simplicial complex embedded in R^3 using persistence diagrams generated from all possible height filtrations (an uncountably infinite number of directions). In this paper, we present an algorithm for reconstructing plane graphs K = (V, E) in R^2, i.e., a planar graph with vertices in general position and a straight-line embedding, from a quadratic number height filtrations and their respective persistence diagrams.