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Abstract We study the probabilistic convergence between the mapper graph and the Reeb graph of a topological space $${\mathbb {X}}$$ X equipped with a continuous function $$f: {\mathbb {X}}\rightarrow \mathbb {R}$$ f : X → R . We first give a categorification of the mapper graph and the Reeb graph by interpreting them in terms of cosheaves and stratified covers of the real line $$\mathbb {R}$$ R . We then introduce a variant of the classic mapper graph of Singh et al. (in: Eurographics symposium on point-based graphics, 2007), referred to as the enhanced mapper graph, and demonstrate that such a construction approximates the Reeb graph of $$({\mathbb {X}}, f)$$ ( X , f ) when it is applied to points randomly sampled from a probability density function concentrated on $$({\mathbb {X}}, f)$$ ( X , f ) . Our techniques are based on the interleaving distance of constructible cosheaves and topological estimation via kernel density estimates. Following Munch and Wang (In: 32nd international symposium on computational geometry, volume 51 of Leibniz international proceedings in informatics (LIPIcs), Dagstuhl, Germany, pp 53:1–53:16, 2016), we first show that the mapper graph of $$({\mathbb {X}}, f)$$ ( X , f ) , a constructible $$\mathbb {R}$$ R -space (with a fixed open cover), approximates the Reeb graph of the same space. We then construct an isomorphism between the mapper of $$({\mathbb {X}},f)$$ ( X , f ) to the mapper of a super-level set of a probability density function concentrated on $$({\mathbb {X}}, f)$$ ( X , f ) . Finally, building on the approach of Bobrowski et al. (Bernoulli 23 (1):288–328, 2017b), we show that, with high probability, we can recover the mapper of the super-level set given a sufficiently large sample. Our work is the first to consider the mapper construction using the theory of cosheaves in a probabilistic setting. It is part of an ongoing effort to combine sheaf theory, probability, and statistics, to support topological data analysis with random data.