🍩 Database of Original & Non-Theoretical Uses of Topology

(found 8 matches in 0.001583s)

  1. A Topological Approach to Selecting Models of Biological Experiments (2019)

    M. Ulmer, Lori Ziegelmeier, Chad M. Topaz
    Abstract We use topological data analysis as a tool to analyze the fit of mathematical models to experimental data. This study is built on data obtained from motion tracking groups of aphids in [Nilsen et al., PLOS One, 2013] and two random walk models that were proposed to describe the data. One model incorporates social interactions between the insects via a functional dependence on an aphid’s distance to its nearest neighbor. The second model is a control model that ignores this dependence. We compare data from each model to data from experiment by performing statistical tests based on three different sets of measures. First, we use time series of order parameters commonly used in collective motion studies. These order parameters measure the overall polarization and angular momentum of the group, and do not rely on a priori knowledge of the models that produced the data. Second, we use order parameter time series that do rely on a priori knowledge, namely average distance to nearest neighbor and percentage of aphids moving. Third, we use computational persistent homology to calculate topological signatures of the data. Analysis of the a priori order parameters indicates that the interactive model better describes the experimental data than the control model does. The topological approach performs as well as these a priori order parameters and better than the other order parameters, suggesting the utility of the topological approach in the absence of specific knowledge of mechanisms underlying the data.

  5. Analyzing Collective Motion With Machine Learning and Topology (2019)

    Dhananjay Bhaskar, Angelika Manhart, Jesse Milzman, John T. Nardini, Kathleen M. Storey, Chad M. Topaz, Lori Ziegelmeier
    Abstract We use topological data analysis and machine learning to study a seminal model of collective motion in biology [M. R. D’Orsogna et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 104302 (2006)]. This model describes agents interacting nonlinearly via attractive-repulsive social forces and gives rise to collective behaviors such as flocking and milling. To classify the emergent collective motion in a large library of numerical simulations and to recover model parameters from the simulation data, we apply machine learning techniques to two different types of input. First, we input time series of order parameters traditionally used in studies of collective motion. Second, we input measures based on topology that summarize the time-varying persistent homology of simulation data over multiple scales. This topological approach does not require prior knowledge of the expected patterns. For both unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods, the topological approach outperforms the one that is based on traditional order parameters.

  6. Efficient Planning of Multi-Robot Collective Transport Using Graph Reinforcement Learning With Higher Order Topological Abstraction (2023)

    Steve Paul, Wenyuan Li, Brian Smyth, Yuzhou Chen, Yulia Gel, Souma Chowdhury
    Abstract Efficient multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) is fundamental to various time-sensitive applications such as disaster response, warehouse operations, and construction. This paper tackles a particular class of these problems that we call MRTA-collective transport or MRTA-CT - here tasks present varying workloads and deadlines, and robots are subject to flight range, communication range, and payload constraints. For large instances of these problems involving 100s-1000's of tasks and 10s-100s of robots, traditional non-learning solvers are often time-inefficient, and emerging learning-based policies do not scale well to larger-sized problems without costly retraining. To address this gap, we use a recently proposed encoder-decoder graph neural network involving Capsule networks and multi-head attention mechanism, and innovatively add topological descriptors (TD) as new features to improve transferability to unseen problems of similar and larger size. Persistent homology is used to derive the TD, and proximal policy optimization is used to train our TD-augmented graph neural network. The resulting policy model compares favorably to state-of-the-art non-learning baselines while being much faster. The benefit of using TD is readily evident when scaling to test problems of size larger than those used in training.

  7. Branching and Circular Features in High Dimensional Data (2011)

    B. Wang, B. Summa, V. Pascucci, M. Vejdemo-Johansson
    Abstract Large observations and simulations in scientific research give rise to high-dimensional data sets that present many challenges and opportunities in data analysis and visualization. Researchers in application domains such as engineering, computational biology, climate study, imaging and motion capture are faced with the problem of how to discover compact representations of highdimensional data while preserving their intrinsic structure. In many applications, the original data is projected onto low-dimensional space via dimensionality reduction techniques prior to modeling. One problem with this approach is that the projection step in the process can fail to preserve structure in the data that is only apparent in high dimensions. Conversely, such techniques may create structural illusions in the projection, implying structure not present in the original high-dimensional data. Our solution is to utilize topological techniques to recover important structures in high-dimensional data that contains non-trivial topology. Specifically, we are interested in high-dimensional branching structures. We construct local circle-valued coordinate functions to represent such features. Subsequently, we perform dimensionality reduction on the data while ensuring such structures are visually preserved. Additionally, we study the effects of global circular structures on visualizations. Our results reveal never-before-seen structures on real-world data sets from a variety of applications.

  8. PI-Net: A Deep Learning Approach to Extract Topological Persistence Images (2020)

    Anirudh Som, Hongjun Choi, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Matthew Buman, Pavan Turaga
    Abstract Topological features such as persistence diagrams and their functional approximations like persistence images (PIs) have been showing substantial promise for machine learning and computer vision applications. This is greatly attributed to the robustness topological representations provide against different types of physical nuisance variables seen in real-world data, such as view-point, illumination, and more. However, key bottlenecks to their large scale adoption are computational expenditure and difficulty incorporating them in a differentiable architecture. We take an important step in this paper to mitigate these bottlenecks by proposing a novel one-step approach to generate PIs directly from the input data. We design two separate convolutional neural network architectures, one designed to take in multi-variate time series signals as input and another that accepts multi-channel images as input. We call these networks Signal PI-Net and Image PINet respectively. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose the use of deep learning for computing topological features directly from data. We explore the use of the proposed PI-Net architectures on two applications: human activity recognition using tri-axial accelerometer sensor data and image classification. We demonstrate the ease of fusion of PIs in supervised deep learning architectures and speed up of several orders of magnitude for extracting PIs from data. Our code is available at https://github.com/anirudhsom/PI-Net.