🍩 Database of Original & Non-Theoretical Uses of Topology

(found 99 matches in 0.023162s)

  3. Persistent Homology for Breast Tumor Classification Using Mammogram Scans (2022)

    Aras Asaad, Dashti Ali, Taban Majeed, Rasber Rashid
    Abstract An Important tool in the field topological data analysis is known as persistent Homology (PH) which is used to encode abstract representation of the homology of data at different resolutions in the form of persistence diagram (PD). In this work we build more than one PD representation of a single image based on a landmark selection method, known as local binary patterns, that encode different types of local textures from images. We employed different PD vectorizations using persistence landscapes, persistence images, persistence binning (Betti Curve) and statistics. We tested the effectiveness of proposed landmark based PH on two publicly available breast abnormality detection datasets using mammogram scans. Sensitivity of landmark based PH obtained is over 90% in both datasets for the detection of abnormal breast scans. Finally, experimental results give new insights on using different types of PD vectorizations which help in utilising PH in conjunction with machine learning classifiers.

  4. Chatter Diagnosis in Milling Using Supervised Learning and Topological Features Vector (2019)

    Melih C. Yesilli, Sarah Tymochko, Firas A. Khasawneh, Elizabeth Munch
    Abstract Chatter detection has become a prominent subject of interest due to its effect on cutting tool life, surface finish and spindle of machine tool. Most of the existing methods in chatter detection literature are based on signal processing and signal decomposition. In this study, we use topological features of data simulating cutting tool vibrations, combined with four supervised machine learning algorithms to diagnose chatter in the milling process. Persistence diagrams, a method of representing topological features, are not easily used in the context of machine learning, so they must be transformed into a form that is more amenable. Specifically, we will focus on two different methods for featurizing persistence diagrams, Carlsson coordinates and template functions. In this paper, we provide classification results for simulated data from various cutting configurations, including upmilling and downmilling, in addition to the same data with some added noise. Our results show that Carlsson Coordinates and Template Functions yield accuracies as high as 96% and 95%, respectively. We also provide evidence that these topological methods are noise robust descriptors for chatter detection.

  8. Transfer Learning for Autonomous Chatter Detection in Machining (2022)

    Melih C. Yesilli, Firas A. Khasawneh, Brian P. Mann
    Abstract Large-amplitude chatter vibrations are one of the most important phenomena in machining processes. It is often detrimental in cutting operations causing a poor surface finish and decreased tool life. Therefore, chatter detection using machine learning has been an active research area over the last decade. Three challenges can be identified in applying machine learning for chatter detection at large in industry: an insufficient understanding of the universality of chatter features across different processes, the need for automating feature extraction, and the existence of limited data for each specific workpiece-machine tool combination, e.g., when machining one-off products. These three challenges can be grouped under the umbrella of transfer learning, which is concerned with studying how knowledge gained from one setting can be leveraged to obtain information in new settings. This paper studies automating chatter detection by evaluating transfer learning of prominent as well as novel chatter detection methods. We investigate chatter classification accuracy using a variety of features extracted from turning and milling experiments with different cutting configurations. The studied methods include Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Power Spectral Density (PSD), the Auto-correlation Function (ACF), and decomposition based tools such as Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) and Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD). We also examine more recent approaches based on Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and similarity measures of time series based on Discrete Time Warping (DTW). We evaluate transfer learning potential of each approach by training and testing both within and across the turning and milling data sets. Four supervised classification algorithms are explored: support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression, random forest classification, and gradient boosting. In addition to accuracy, we also comment on the automation potential of feature extraction for each approach which is integral to creating autonomous manufacturing centers. Our results show that carefully chosen time-frequency features can lead to high classification accuracies albeit at the cost of requiring manual pre-processing and the tagging of an expert user. On the other hand, we found that the TDA and DTW approaches can provide accuracies and F1-scores on par with the time-frequency methods without the need for manual preprocessing via completely automatic pipelines. Further, we discovered that the DTW approach outperforms all other methods when trained using the milling data and tested on the turning data. Therefore, TDA and DTW approaches may be preferred over the time-frequency-based approaches for fully automated chatter detection schemes. DTW and TDA also can be more advantageous when pooling data from either limited workpiece-machine tool combinations, or from small data sets of one-off processes.

  9. Modelling Topological Features of Swarm Behaviour in Space and Time With Persistence Landscapes (2017)

    P. Corcoran, C. B. Jones
    Abstract This paper presents a model of swarm behavior that encodes the spatial-temporal characteristics of topological features, such as holes and connected components. Specifically, the persistence of topological features with respect to time is computed using zig-zag persistent homology. This information is in turn modelled as a persistence landscape, which forms a normed vector space and facilitates the application of statistical and data mining techniques. Validation of the proposed model is performed using a real data set corresponding to a swarm of fish. It is demonstrated that the proposed model may be used to perform retrieval and clustering of swarm behavior in terms of topological features. In fact, it is discovered that clustering returns clusters corresponding to the swarm behaviors of flock, torus, and disordered. These are the most frequently occurring types of behavior exhibited by swarms in general.

  10. Topological Detection of Phenomenological Bifurcations With Unreliable Kernel Density Estimates (2024)

    Sunia Tanweer, Firas A. Khasawneh
    Abstract Phenomenological (P-type) bifurcations are qualitative changes in stochastic dynamical systems whereby the stationary probability density function (PDF) changes its topology. The current state of the art for detecting these bifurcations requires reliable kernel density estimates computed from an ensemble of system realizations. However, in several real world signals such as Big Data, only a single system realization is available—making it impossible to estimate a reliable kernel density. This study presents an approach for detecting P-type bifurcations using unreliable density estimates. The approach creates an ensemble of objects from Topological Data Analysis (TDA) called persistence diagrams from the system’s sole realization and statistically analyzes the resulting set. We compare several methods for replicating the original persistence diagram including Gibbs point process modelling, Pairwise Interaction Point Modelling, and subsampling. We show that for the purpose of predicting a bifurcation, the simple method of subsampling exceeds the other two methods of point process modelling in performance.

  11. Capturing Shape Information With Multi-Scale Topological Loss Terms For 3D Reconstruction (2022)

    Dominik J. E. Waibel, Scott Atwell, Matthias Meier, Carsten Marr, Bastian Rieck
    Abstract Reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images is both challenging for our brains and machine learning algorithms. To support this spatial reasoning task, contextual information about the overall shape of an object is critical. However, such information is not captured by established loss terms (e.g. Dice loss). We propose to complement geometrical shape information by including multi-scale topological features, such as connected components, cycles, and voids, in the reconstruction loss. Our method uses cubical complexes to calculate topological features of 3D volume data and employs an optimal transport distance to guide the reconstruction process. This topology-aware loss is fully differentiable, computationally efficient, and can be added to any neural network. We demonstrate the utility of our loss by incorporating it into SHAPR, a model for predicting the 3D cell shape of individual cells based on 2D microscopy images. Using a hybrid loss that leverages both geometrical and topological information of single objects to assess their shape, we find that topological information substantially improves the quality of reconstructions, thus highlighting its ability to extract more relevant features from image datasets.

  12. Determining Structural Properties of Artificial Neural Networks Using Algebraic Topology (2021)

    David Pérez Fernández, Asier Gutiérrez-Fandiño, Jordi Armengol-Estapé, Marta Villegas
    Abstract Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are widely used for approximating complex functions. The process that is usually followed to define the most appropriate architecture for an ANN given a specific function is mostly empirical. Once this architecture has been defined, weights are usually optimized according to the error function. On the other hand, we observe that ANNs can be represented as graphs and their topological 'fingerprints' can be obtained using Persistent Homology (PH). In this paper, we describe a proposal focused on designing more principled architecture search procedures. To do this, different architectures for solving problems related to a heterogeneous set of datasets have been analyzed. The results of the evaluation corroborate that PH effectively characterizes the ANN invariants: when ANN density (layers and neurons) or sample feeding order is the only difference, PH topological invariants appear; in the opposite direction in different sub-problems (i.e. different labels), PH varies. This approach based on topological analysis helps towards the goal of designing more principled architecture search procedures and having a better understanding of ANNs.

  13. Representability of Algebraic Topology for Biomolecules in Machine Learning Based Scoring and Virtual Screening (2018)

    Zixuan Cang, Lin Mu, Guo-Wei Wei
    Abstract This work introduces a number of algebraic topology approaches, including multi-component persistent homology, multi-level persistent homology, and electrostatic persistence for the representation, characterization, and description of small molecules and biomolecular complexes. In contrast to the conventional persistent homology, multi-component persistent homology retains critical chemical and biological information during the topological simplification of biomolecular geometric complexity. Multi-level persistent homology enables a tailored topological description of inter- and/or intra-molecular interactions of interest. Electrostatic persistence incorporates partial charge information into topological invariants. These topological methods are paired with Wasserstein distance to characterize similarities between molecules and are further integrated with a variety of machine learning algorithms, including k-nearest neighbors, ensemble of trees, and deep convolutional neural networks, to manifest their descriptive and predictive powers for protein-ligand binding analysis and virtual screening of small molecules. Extensive numerical experiments involving 4,414 protein-ligand complexes from the PDBBind database and 128,374 ligand-target and decoy-target pairs in the DUD database are performed to test respectively the scoring power and the discriminatory power of the proposed topological learning strategies. It is demonstrated that the present topological learning outperforms other existing methods in protein-ligand binding affinity prediction and ligand-decoy discrimination.

  14. Topological Descriptors Help Predict Guest Adsorption in Nanoporous Materials (2020)

    Aditi S. Krishnapriyan, Maciej Haranczyk, Dmitriy Morozov
    Abstract Machine learning has emerged as an attractive alternative to experiments and simulations for predicting material properties. Usually, such an approach relies on specific domain knowledge for feature design: each learning target requires careful selection of features that an expert recognizes as important for the specific task. The major drawback of this approach is that computation of only a few structural features has been implemented so far, and it is difficult to tell a priori which features are important for a particular application. The latter problem has been empirically observed for predictors of guest uptake in nanoporous materials: local and global porosity features become dominant descriptors at low and high pressures, respectively. We investigate a feature representation of materials using tools from topological data analysis. Specifically, we use persistent homology to describe the geometry of nanoporous materials at various scales. We combine our topological descriptor with traditional structural features and investigate the relative importance of each to the prediction tasks. We demonstrate an application of this feature representation by predicting methane adsorption in zeolites, for pressures in the range of 1-200 bar. Our results not only show a considerable improvement compared to the baseline, but they also highlight that topological features capture information complementary to the structural features: this is especially important for the adsorption at low pressure, a task particularly difficult for the traditional features. Furthermore, by investigation of the importance of individual topological features in the adsorption model, we are able to pinpoint the location of the pores that correlate best to adsorption at different pressure, contributing to our atom-level understanding of structure-property relationships.

  15. Pore Configuration Landscape of Granular Crystallization (2017)

    Mohammad Saadatfar, Hiroshi Takeuchi, Vanessa Robins, Nicolas Francois, Yisuaki Hiraoka
    Abstract Emergence and growth of crystalline domains in granular media remains under-explored. Here, the authors analyse tomographic snapshots from partially recrystallized packings of spheres using persistent homology and find agreement with proposed transitions based on continuous deformation of octahedral and tetrahedral voids.

  22. Lipschitz Functions Have Lp-Stable Persistence (2010)

    David Cohen-Steiner, Herbert Edelsbrunner, John Harer, Yuriy Mileyko
    Abstract We prove two stability results for Lipschitz functions on triangulable, compact metric spaces and consider applications of both to problems in systems biology. Given two functions, the first result is formulated in terms of the Wasserstein distance between their persistence diagrams and the second in terms of their total persistence.

  24. Topological Differential Testing (2020)

    Kristopher Ambrose, Steve Huntsman, Michael Robinson, Matvey Yutin
    Abstract We introduce topological differential testing (TDT), an approach to extracting the consensus behavior of a set of programs on a corpus of inputs. TDT uses the topological notion of a simplicial complex (and implicitly draws on richer topological notions such as sheaves and persistence) to determine inputs that cause inconsistent behavior and in turn reveal \emph\de facto\ input specifications. We gently introduce TDT with a toy example before detailing its application to understanding the PDF file format from the behavior of various parsers. Finally, we discuss theoretical details and other possible applications.

  25. Graph Filtration Learning (2020)

    Christoph Hofer, Florian Graf, Bastian Rieck, Marc Niethammer, Roland Kwitt
    Abstract We propose an approach to learning with graph-structured data in the problem domain of graph classification. In particular, we present a novel type of readout operation to aggregate node features into a graph-level representation. To this end, we leverage persistent homology computed via a real-valued, learnable, filter function. We establish the theoretical foundation for differentiating through the persistent homology computation. Empirically, we show that this type of readout operation compares favorably to previous techniques, especially when the graph connectivity structure is informative for the learning problem.

  26. Investigation of Flash Crash via Topological Data Analysis (2020)

    Wonse Kim, Younng-Jin Kim, Gihyun Lee, Woong Kook
    Abstract Topological data analysis has been acknowledged as one of the most successful mathematical data analytic methodologies in various fields including medicine, genetics, and image analysis. In this paper, we explore the potential of this methodology in finance by applying persistence landscape and dynamic time series analysis to analyze an extreme event in the stock market, known as Flash Crash. We will provide results of our empirical investigation to confirm the effectiveness of our new method not only for the characterization of this extreme event but also for its prediction purposes.

  27. A Primer on Topological Data Analysis to Support Image Analysis Tasks in Environmental Science (2023)

    Lander Ver Hoef, Henry Adams, Emily J. King, Imme Ebert-Uphoff
    Abstract Abstract Topological data analysis (TDA) is a tool from data science and mathematics that is beginning to make waves in environmental science. In this work, we seek to provide an intuitive and understandable introduction to a tool from TDA that is particularly useful for the analysis of imagery, namely, persistent homology. We briefly discuss the theoretical background but focus primarily on understanding the output of this tool and discussing what information it can glean. To this end, we frame our discussion around a guiding example of classifying satellite images from the sugar, fish, flower, and gravel dataset produced for the study of mesoscale organization of clouds by Rasp et al. We demonstrate how persistent homology and its vectorization, persistence landscapes, can be used in a workflow with a simple machine learning algorithm to obtain good results, and we explore in detail how we can explain this behavior in terms of image-level features. One of the core strengths of persistent homology is how interpretable it can be, so throughout this paper we discuss not just the patterns we find but why those results are to be expected given what we know about the theory of persistent homology. Our goal is that readers of this paper will leave with a better understanding of TDA and persistent homology, will be able to identify problems and datasets of their own for which persistent homology could be helpful, and will gain an understanding of the results they obtain from applying the included GitHub example code. Significance Statement Information such as the geometric structure and texture of image data can greatly support the inference of the physical state of an observed Earth system, for example, in remote sensing to determine whether wildfires are active or to identify local climate zones. Persistent homology is a branch of topological data analysis that allows one to extract such information in an interpretable way—unlike black-box methods like deep neural networks. The purpose of this paper is to explain in an intuitive manner what persistent homology is and how researchers in environmental science can use it to create interpretable models. We demonstrate the approach to identify certain cloud patterns from satellite imagery and find that the resulting model is indeed interpretable.

  28. Topological Graph Neural Networks (2021)

    Max Horn, Edward De Brouwer, Michael Moor, Yves Moreau, Bastian Rieck, Karsten Borgwardt
    Abstract Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a powerful architecture for tackling graph learning tasks, yet have been shown to be oblivious to eminent substructures, such as cycles. We present TOGL, a novel layer that incorporates global topological information of a graph using persistent homology. TOGL can be easily integrated into any type of GNN and is strictly more expressive in terms of the Weisfeiler--Lehman test of isomorphism. Augmenting GNNs with our layer leads to beneficial predictive performance, both on synthetic data sets, which can be trivially classified by humans but not by ordinary GNNs, and on real-world data.

  29. Characterizing Scales of Genetic Recombination and Antibiotic Resistance in Pathogenic Bacteria Using Topological Data Analysis (2014)

    Kevin J. Emmett, Raul Rabadan
    Abstract Pathogenic bacteria present a large disease burden on human health. Control of these pathogens is hampered by rampant lateral gene transfer, whereby pathogenic strains may acquire genes conferring resistance to common antibiotics. Here we introduce tools from topological data analysis to characterize the frequency and scale of lateral gene transfer in bacteria, focusing on a set of pathogens of significant public health relevance. As a case study, we examine the spread of antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus aureus. Finally, we consider the possible role of the human microbiome as a reservoir for antibiotic resistance genes.

  30. A Multi-Parameter Persistence Framework for Mathematical Morphology (2021)

    Yu-Min Chung, Sarah Day, Chuan-Shen Hu
    Abstract The field of mathematical morphology offers well-studied techniques for image processing. In this work, we view morphological operations through the lens of persistent homology, a tool at the heart of the field of topological data analysis. We demonstrate that morphological operations naturally form a multiparameter filtration and that persistent homology can then be used to extract information about both topology and geometry in the images as well as to automate methods for optimizing the study and rendering of structure in images. For illustration, we apply this framework to analyze noisy binary, grayscale, and color images.

  31. Topological Machine Learning With Persistence Indicator Functions (2019)

    Bastian Rieck, Filip Sadlo, Heike Leitte
    Abstract Techniques from computational topology, in particular persistent homology, are becoming increasingly relevant for data analysis. Their stable metrics permit the use of many distance-based data analysis methods, such as multidimensional scaling, while providing a firm theoretical ground. Many modern machine learning algorithms, however, are based on kernels. This paper presents persistence indicator functions (PIFs), which summarize persistence diagrams, i.e., feature descriptors in topological data analysis. PIFs can be calculated and compared in linear time and have many beneficial properties, such as the availability of a kernel-based similarity measure. We demonstrate their usage in common data analysis scenarios, such as confidence set estimation and classification of complex structured data.

  32. Topology of Force Networks in Granular Media Under Impact (2017)

    M. X. Lim, R. P. Behringer
    Abstract We investigate the evolution of the force network in experimental systems of two-dimensional granular materials under impact. We use the first Betti number, , and persistence diagrams, as measures of the topological properties of the force network. We show that the structure of the network has a complex, hysteretic dependence on both the intruder acceleration and the total force response of the granular material. can also distinguish between the nonlinear formation and relaxation of the force network. In addition, using the persistence diagram of the force network, we show that the size of the loops in the force network has a Poisson-like distribution, the characteristic size of which changes over the course of the impact.

  33. Topological Singularity Detection at Multiple Scales (2023)

    Julius von Rohrscheidt, Bastian Rieck
    Abstract The manifold hypothesis, which assumes that data lies on or close to an unknown manifold of low intrinsic dimension, is a staple of modern machine learning research. However, recent work has shown that real-world data exhibits distinct non-manifold structures, i.e. singularities, that can lead to erroneous findings. Detecting such singularities is therefore crucial as a precursor to interpolation and inference tasks. We address this issue by developing a topological framework that (i) quantifies the local intrinsic dimension, and (ii) yields a Euclidicity score for assessing the ’manifoldness’ of a point along multiple scales. Our approach identifies singularities of complex spaces, while also capturing singular structures and local geometric complexity in image data.

  34. Topological Data Analysis of C. Elegans Locomotion and Behavior (2021)

    Ashleigh Thomas, Kathleen Bates, Alex Elchesen, Iryna Hartsock, Hang Lu, Peter Bubenik
    Abstract Video of nematodes/roundworms was analyzed using persistent homology to study locomotion and behavior. In each frame, an organism's body posture was represented by a high-dimensional vector. By concatenating points in fixed-duration segments of this time series, we created a sliding window embedding (sometimes called a time delay embedding) where each point corresponds to a sequence of postures of an organism. Persistent homology on the points in this time series detected behaviors and comparisons of these persistent homology computations detected variation in their corresponding behaviors. We used average persistence landscapes and machine learning techniques to study changes in locomotion and behavior in varying environments.

  35. A Simplified Algorithm for Identifying Abnormal Changes in Dynamic Networks (2022)

    Bouchaib Azamir, Driss Bennis, Bertrand Michel
    Abstract Topological data analysis has recently been applied to the study of dynamic networks. In this context, an algorithm was introduced and helps, among other things, to detect early warning signals of abnormal changes in the dynamic network under study. However, the complexity of this algorithm increases significantly once the database studied grows. In this paper, we propose a simplification of the algorithm without affecting its performance. We give various applications and simulations of the new algorithm on some weighted networks. The obtained results show clearly the efficiency of the introduced approach. Moreover, in some cases, the proposed algorithm makes it possible to highlight local information and sometimes early warning signals of local abnormal changes.

  36. A Stable Multi-Scale Kernel for Topological Machine Learning (2015)

    Jan Reininghaus, Stefan Huber, Ulrich Bauer, Roland Kwitt
    Abstract Topological data analysis offers a rich source of valuable information to study vision problems. Yet, so far we lack a theoretically sound connection to popular kernel-based learning techniques, such as kernel SVMs or kernel PCA. In this work, we establish such a connection by designing a multi-scale kernel for persistence diagrams, a stable summary representation of topological features in data. We show that this kernel is positive definite and prove its stability with respect to the 1-Wasserstein distance. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for 3D shape classification/retrieval and texture recognition show considerable performance gains of the proposed method compared to an alternative approach that is based on the recently introduced persistence landscapes.

  37. Topological Machine Learning for Multivariate Time Series (2020)

    Chengyuan Wu, Carol Anne Hargreaves
    Abstract We develop a framework for analyzing multivariate time series using topological data analysis (TDA) methods. The proposed methodology involves converting the multivariate time series to point cloud data, calculating Wasserstein distances between the persistence diagrams and using the \$k\$-nearest neighbors algorithm (\$k\$-NN) for supervised machine learning. Two methods (symmetry-breaking and anchor points) are also introduced to enable TDA to better analyze data with heterogeneous features that are sensitive to translation, rotation, or choice of coordinates. We apply our methods to room occupancy detection based on 5 time-dependent variables (temperature, humidity, light, CO2 and humidity ratio). Experimental results show that topological methods are effective in predicting room occupancy during a time window. We also apply our methods to an Activity Recognition dataset and obtained good results.

  38. Euler Characteristic Surfaces (2021)

    Gabriele Beltramo, Rayna Andreeva, Ylenia Giarratano, Miguel O. Bernabeu, Rik Sarkar, Primoz Skraba
    Abstract We study the use of the Euler characteristic for multiparameter topological data analysis. Euler characteristic is a classical, well-understood topological invariant that has appeared in numerous applications, including in the context of random fields. The goal of this paper is to present the extension of using the Euler characteristic in higher-dimensional parameter spaces. While topological data analysis of higher-dimensional parameter spaces using stronger invariants such as homology continues to be the subject of intense research, Euler characteristic is more manageable theoretically and computationally, and this analysis can be seen as an important intermediary step in multi-parameter topological data analysis. We show the usefulness of the techniques using artificially generated examples, and a real-world application of detecting diabetic retinopathy in retinal images.

  39. Robust Crossings Detection in Noisy Signals Using Topological Signal Processing (2024)

    Sunia Tanweer, Firas A. Khasawneh, Elizabeth Munch
    Abstract This article explores a novel method of bracketing zero-crossings for both 1-D functions and discretely sampled time series by the application of 0-D persistent homology from algebraic topology. We introduce an algorithm and demonstrate its capability of detecting crossing in noisy signals across various sampling frequencies. Compared to other software-based methods for crossing-detection in signals, our approach is typically faster, shows a higher accuracy, and has the unique ability to identify all roots within the provided interval instead of detecting only one out of all. We also discuss different options for mathematically estimating the persistence threshold— a parameter which impacts and controls the correct bracketing of roots. Finally, we explore the potential of extending our algorithm to higher dimensions.

  40. Geometry and Topology of the Space of Sonar Target Echos (2018)

    Michael Robinson, Sean Fennell, Brian DiZio, Jennifer Dumiak
    Abstract Successful synthetic aperture sonar target classification depends on the “shape” of the scatterers within a target signature. This article presents a workflow that computes a target-to-target distance from persistence diagrams, since the “shape” of a signature informs its persistence diagram in a structure-preserving way. The target-to-target distances derived from persistence diagrams compare favorably against those derived from spectral features and have the advantage of being substantially more compact. While spectral features produce clusters associated to each target type that are reasonably dense and well formed, the clusters are not well-separated from one another. In rather dramatic contrast, a distance derived from persistence diagrams results in highly separated clusters at the expense of some misclassification of outliers.

  41. Topological Feature Extraction for Comparison of Terascale Combustion Simulation Data (2011)

    Ajith Mascarenhas, Ray W. Grout, Peer-Timo Bremer, Evatt R. Hawkes, Valerio Pascucci, Jacqueline H. Chen
    Abstract We describe a combinatorial streaming algorithm to extract features which identify regions of local intense rates of mixing in twoterascale turbulent combustion simulations. Our algorithm allows simulation data comprised of scalar fields represented on 728x896x512 or 2025x1600x400 grids to be processed on a single relatively lightweight machine. The turbulence-induced mixing governs the rate of reaction and hence is of principal interest in these combustion simulations. We use our feature extraction algorithm to compare two very different simulations and find that in both the thickness of the extracted features grows with decreasing turbulence intensity. Simultaneous consideration of results of applying the algorithm to the HO2 mass fraction field indicates that autoignition kernels near the base of a lifted flame tend not to overlap with the high mixing rate regions.

  42. Topological Data Analysis: Concepts, Computation, and Applications in Chemical Engineering (2021)

    Alexander D. Smith, Paweł Dłotko, Victor M. Zavala
    Abstract A primary hypothesis that drives scientific and engineering studies is that data has structure. The dominant paradigms for describing such structure are statistics (e.g., moments, correlation functions) and signal processing (e.g., convolutional neural nets, Fourier series). Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a field of mathematics that analyzes data from a fundamentally different perspective. TDA represents datasets as geometric objects and provides dimensionality reduction techniques that project such objects onto low-dimensional descriptors. The key properties of these descriptors (also known as topological features) are that they provide multiscale information and that they are stable under perturbations (e.g., noise, translation, and rotation). In this work, we review the key mathematical concepts and methods of TDA and present different applications in chemical engineering.

  43. Computing Robustness and Persistence for Images (2010)

    P. Bendich, H. Edelsbrunner, M. Kerber
    Abstract We are interested in 3-dimensional images given as arrays of voxels with intensity values. Extending these values to a continuous function, we study the robustness of homology classes in its level and interlevel sets, that is, the amount of perturbation needed to destroy these classes. The structure of the homology classes and their robustness, over all level and interlevel sets, can be visualized by a triangular diagram of dots obtained by computing the extended persistence of the function. We give a fast hierarchical algorithm using the dual complexes of oct-tree approximations of the function. In addition, we show that for balanced oct-trees, the dual complexes are geometrically realized in R3 and can thus be used to construct level and interlevel sets. We apply these tools to study 3-dimensional images of plant root systems.

  44. The Importance of Forgetting: Limiting Memory Improves Recovery of Topological Characteristics From Neural Data (2018)

    Samir Chowdhury, Bowen Dai, Facundo Mémoli
    Abstract We develop of a line of work initiated by Curto and Itskov towards understanding the amount of information contained in the spike trains of hippocampal place cells via topology considerations. Previously, it was established that simply knowing which groups of place cells fire together in an animal’s hippocampus is sufficient to extract the global topology of the animal’s physical environment. We model a system where collections of place cells group and ungroup according to short-term plasticity rules. In particular, we obtain the surprising result that in experiments with spurious firing, the accuracy of the extracted topological information decreases with the persistence (beyond a certain regime) of the cell groups. This suggests that synaptic transience, or forgetting, is a mechanism by which the brain counteracts the effects of spurious place cell activity.

  45. Hyperparameter Optimization of Topological Features for Machine Learning Applications (2019)

    Francis Motta, Christopher Tralie, Rossella Bedini, Fabiano Bini, Gilberto Bini, Hamed Eramian, Marcio Gameiro, Steve Haase, Hugh Haddox, John Harer, Nick Leiby, Franco Marinozzi, Scott Novotney, Gabe Rocklin, Jed Singer, Devin Strickland, Matt Vaughn
    Abstract This paper describes a general pipeline for generating optimal vector representations of topological features of data for use with machine learning algorithms. This pipeline can be viewed as a costly black-box function defined over a complex configuration space, each point of which specifies both how features are generated and how predictive models are trained on those features. We propose using state-of-the-art Bayesian optimization algorithms to inform the choice of topological vectorization hyperparameters while simultaneously choosing learning model parameters. We demonstrate the need for and effectiveness of this pipeline using two difficult biological learning problems, and illustrate the nontrivial interactions between topological feature generation and learning model hyperparameters.

  46. Persistent Homology and Many-Body Atomic Structure for Medium-Range Order in the Glass (2015)

    Takenobu Nakamura, Yasuaki Hiraoka, Akihiko Hirata, Emerson G. Escolar, Yasumasa Nishiura
    Abstract The characterization of the medium-range (MRO) order in amorphous materials and its relation to the short-range order is discussed. A new topological approach to extract a hierarchical structure of amorphous materials is presented, which is robust against small perturbations and allows us to distinguish it from periodic or random configurations. This method is called the persistence diagram (PD) and introduces scales to many-body atomic structures to facilitate size and shape characterization. We first illustrate the representation of perfect crystalline and random structures in PDs. Then, the MRO in amorphous silica is characterized using the appropriate PD. The PD approach compresses the size of the data set significantly, to much smaller geometrical summaries, and has considerable potential for application to a wide range of materials, including complex molecular liquids, granular materials, and metallic glasses.

  47. Localization in the Crowd With Topological Constraints (2020)

    Shahira Abousamra, Minh Hoai, Dimitris Samaras, Chao Chen
    Abstract We address the problem of crowd localization, i.e., the prediction of dots corresponding to people in a crowded scene. Due to various challenges, a localization method is prone to spatial semantic errors, i.e., predicting multiple dots within a same person or collapsing multiple dots in a cluttered region. We propose a topological approach targeting these semantic errors. We introduce a topological constraint that teaches the model to reason about the spatial arrangement of dots. To enforce this constraint, we define a persistence loss based on the theory of persistent homology. The loss compares the topographic landscape of the likelihood map and the topology of the ground truth. Topological reasoning improves the quality of the localization algorithm especially near cluttered regions. On multiple public benchmarks, our method outperforms previous localization methods. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential of our method in improving the performance in the crowd counting task.

  48. Towards a Philological Metric Through a Topological Data Analysis Approach (2020)

    Eduardo Paluzo-Hidalgo, Rocio Gonzalez-Diaz, Miguel A. Gutiérrez-Naranjo
    Abstract The canon of the baroque Spanish literature has been thoroughly studied with philological techniques. The major representatives of the poetry of this epoch are Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora y Argote. They are commonly classified by the literary experts in two different streams: Quevedo belongs to the Conceptismo and G\ńgora to the Culteranismo. Besides, traditionally, even if Quevedo is considered the most representative of the Conceptismo, Lope de Vega is also considered to be, at least, closely related to this literary trend. In this paper, we use Topological Data Analysis techniques to provide a first approach to a metric distance between the literary style of these poets. As a consequence, we reach results that are under the literary experts' criteria, locating the literary style of Lope de Vega, closer to the one of Quevedo than to the one of G\'ǵora.

  49. Statistical Topological Data Analysis - A Kernel Perspective (2015)

    Roland Kwitt, Stefan Huber, Marc Niethammer, Weili Lin, Ulrich Bauer
    Abstract We consider the problem of statistical computations with persistence diagrams, a summary representation of topological features in data. These diagrams encode persistent homology, a widely used invariant in topological data analysis. While several avenues towards a statistical treatment of the diagrams have been explored recently, we follow an alternative route that is motivated by the success of methods based on the embedding of probability measures into reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. In fact, a positive definite kernel on persistence diagrams has recently been proposed, connecting persistent homology to popular kernel-based learning techniques such as support vector machines. However, important properties of that kernel enabling a principled use in the context of probability measure embeddings remain to be explored. Our contribution is to close this gap by proving universality of a variant of the original kernel, and to demonstrate its effective use in two-sample hypothesis testing on synthetic as well as real-world data.

  50. Four-Dimensional Observation of Ductile Fracture in Sintered Iron Using Synchrotron X-Ray Laminography (2019)

    Y. Ozaki, Y. Mugita, M. Aramaki, O. Furukimi, S. Oue, F. Jiang, T. Tsuji, A. Takeuchi, M. Uesugi, K. Ashizuka
    Abstract Synchrotron X-ray laminography was used to examine the time-dependent evolution of the three-dimensional (3D) morphology of micropores in sintered iron during the tensile test. 3D snapshots showed that the networked open pores grow wider than 20 µm along the tensile direction, resulting in the internal necking of the specimen. Subsequently, these pores initiated the cracks perpendicular to the tensile direction by coalescing with the surrounding pre-existing microvoids or with the secondary-generated voids immediately before fracture. Topological analysis of the barycentric positions of these microvoids showed that they form the two-dimensional networks within the ∼20 µm of radius area. These observations strongly indicate that the microvoid coalescence could occur on shear planes formed close to the enlarged open pores or between closed pores by strain accumulation and play an important role in the crack initiation.

  51. Pore Geometry Characterization by Persistent Homology Theory (2018)

    Fei Jiang, Takeshi Tsuji, Tomoyuki Shirai
    Abstract Rock pore geometry has heterogeneous characteristics and is scale dependent. This feature in a geological formation differs significantly from artificial materials and makes it difficult to predict hydrologic and elastic properties. To characterize pore heterogeneity, we propose an evaluation method that exploits the recently developed persistent homology theory. In the proposed method, complex pore geometry is first represented as sphere cloud data using a pore-network extraction method. Then, a persistence diagram (PD) is calculated from the point cloud, which represents the spatial distribution of pore bodies. A new parameter (distance index H) derived from the PD is proposed to characterize the degree of rock heterogeneity. Low H value indicates high heterogeneity. A new empirical equation using this index H is proposed to predict the effective elastic modulus of porous media. The results indicate that the proposed PD analysis is very efficient for extracting topological feature of pore geometry.

  52. Topological Data Analysis for Electric Motor Eccentricity Fault Detection (2022)

    Bingnan Wang, Chungwei Lin, Hiroshi Inoue, Makoto Kanemaru
    Abstract In this paper, we develop topological data analysis (TDA) method for motor current signature analysis (MCSA), and apply it to induction motor eccentricity fault detection. We introduce TDA and present the procedure of extracting topological features from time-domain data that will be represented using persistence diagrams and vectorized Betti sequences. The procedure is applied to induction machine phase current signal analysis, and shown to be highly effective in differentiating signals from different eccentricity levels. With TDA, we are able to use a simple regression model that can predict the fault levels with reasonable accuracy, even for the data of eccentricity levels that are not seen in the training data. The proposed method is model-free, and only requires a small segment of time-domain data to make prediction. These advantages make it attractive for a wide range of fault detection applications.

  53. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Classification Using Persistent Homology (2024)

    Waqar Hussain Shah, Abdullah Baloch, Rider Jaimes-Reátegui, Sohail Iqbal, Syeda Rafia Fatima, Alexander N. Pisarchik
    Abstract Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) is a prevalent form of childhood blood cancer characterized by the proliferation of immature white blood cells that rapidly replace normal cells in the bone marrow. The exponential growth of these leukemic cells can be fatal if not treated promptly. Classifying lymphoblasts and healthy cells poses a significant challenge, even for domain experts, due to their morphological similarities. Automated computer analysis of ALL can provide substantial support in this domain and potentially save numerous lives. In this paper, we propose a novel classification approach that involves analyzing shapes and extracting topological features of ALL cells. We employ persistent homology to capture these topological features. Our technique accurately and efficiently detects and classifies leukemia blast cells, achieving a recall of 98.2% and an F1-score of 94.6%. This approach has the potential to significantly enhance leukemia diagnosis and therapy.

  54. Constructing Shape Spaces From a Topological Perspective (2017)

    Christoph Hofer, Roland Kwitt, Marc Niethammer, Yvonne Höller, Eugen Trinka, Andreas Uhl
    Abstract We consider the task of constructing (metric) shape space(s) from a topological perspective. In particular, we present a generic construction scheme and demonstrate how to apply this scheme when shape is interpreted as the differences that remain after factoring out translation, scaling and rotation. This is achieved by leveraging a recently proposed injective functional transform of 2D/3D (binary) objects, based on persistent homology. The resulting shape space is then equipped with a similarity measure that is (1) by design robust to noise and (2) fulfills all metric axioms. From a practical point of view, analyses of object shape can then be carried out directly on segmented objects obtained from some imaging modality without any preprocessing, such as alignment, smoothing, or landmark selection. We demonstrate the utility of the approach on the problem of distinguishing segmented hippocampi from normal controls vs. patients with Alzheimer’s disease in a challenging setup where volume changes are no longer discriminative.

  55. Severe Slugging Flow Identification From Topological Indicators (2022)

    Simone Casolo
    Abstract In this work, topological data analysis is used to identify the onset of severe slug flow in offshore petroleum production systems. Severe slugging is a multiphase flow regime known to be very inefficient and potentially harmful to process equipment and it is characterized by large oscillations in the production fluid pressure. Time series from pressure sensors in subsea oil wells are processed by means of Takens embedding to produce point clouds of data. Embedded sensor data is then analyzed using persistent homology to obtain topological indicators capable of revealing the occurrence of severe slugging in a condition-based monitoring approach. A large dataset of well events consisting of both real and simulated data is used to demonstrate the possibilty of authomatizing severe slugging detection from live data via topological data analysis. Methods based on persistence diagrams are shown to accurately identify severe slugging and to classify different flow regimes from pressure signals of producing wells with supervised machine learning.

  56. Topological Data Analysis on Simple English Wikipedia Articles (2020)

    Matthew Wright, Xiaojun Zheng
    Abstract Single-parameter persistent homology, a key tool in topological data analysis, has been widely applied to data problems, with statistical techniques that quantify the significance of the results. In contrast, statistical techniques for two-parameter persistence, while highly desirable for real-world applications, have scarcely been considered. We present three statistical approaches for comparing geometric data using two-parameter persistent homology, and we demonstrate the applicability of these approaches on high-dimensional point-cloud data obtained from Simple English Wikipedia articles. These approaches rely on the Hilbert function, matching distance, and barcodes obtained from two-parameter persistence modules computed from the point-cloud data. We demonstrate the applicability of our methods by distinguishing certain subsets of the Wikipedia data, and by comparison with random data. Results include insights into the construction of null distributions and stability of our methods with respect to noisy data. Our statistical methods are broadly applicable for analysis of geometric data indexed by a real-valued parameter.

  57. A Novel Approach for Wafer Defect Pattern Classification Based on Topological Data Analysis (2023)

    Seungchan Ko, Dowan Koo
    Abstract In semiconductor manufacturing, wafer map defect pattern provides critical information for facility maintenance and yield management, so the classification of defect patterns is one of the most important tasks in the manufacturing process. In this paper, we propose a novel way to represent the shape of the defect pattern as a finite-dimensional vector, which will be used as an input for a neural network algorithm for classification. The main idea is to extract the topological features of each pattern by using the theory of persistent homology from topological data analysis (TDA). Through some experiments with a simulated dataset, we show that the proposed method is faster and much more efficient in training with higher accuracy, compared with the method using convolutional neural networks (CNN) which is the most common approach for wafer map defect pattern classification. Moreover, it was shown that our method outperforms the CNN-based method when the number of training data is not enough and is imbalanced.

  58. TDAExplore: Quantitative Analysis of Fluorescence Microscopy Images Through Topology-Based Machine Learning (2021)

    Parker Edwards, Kristen Skruber, Nikola Milićević, James B. Heidings, Tracy-Ann Read, Peter Bubenik, Eric A. Vitriol
    Abstract Recent advances in machine learning have greatly enhanced automatic methods to extract information from fluorescence microscopy data. However, current machine-learning-based models can require hundreds to thousands of images to train, and the most readily accessible models classify images without describing which parts of an image contributed to classification. Here, we introduce TDAExplore, a machine learning image analysis pipeline based on topological data analysis. It can classify different types of cellular perturbations after training with only 20–30 high-resolution images and performs robustly on images from multiple subjects and microscopy modes. Using only images and whole-image labels for training, TDAExplore provides quantitative, spatial information, characterizing which image regions contribute to classification. Computational requirements to train TDAExplore models are modest and a standard PC can perform training with minimal user input. TDAExplore is therefore an accessible, powerful option for obtaining quantitative information about imaging data in a wide variety of applications.

  59. TDA-Net: Fusion of Persistent Homology and Deep Learning Features for COVID-19 Detection From Chest X-Ray Images (2021)

    Mustafa Hajij, Ghada Zamzmi, Fawwaz Batayneh
    Abstract Topological Data Analysis (TDA) has emerged recently as a robust tool to extract and compare the structure of datasets. TDA identifies features in data (e.g., connected components and holes) and assigns a quantitative measure to these features. Several studies reported that topological features extracted by TDA tools provide unique information about the data, discover new insights, and determine which feature is more related to the outcome. On the other hand, the overwhelming success of deep neural networks in learning patterns and relationships has been proven on various data applications including images. To capture the characteristics of both worlds, we propose TDA-Net, a novel ensemble network that fuses topological and deep features for the purpose of enhancing model generalizability and accuracy. We apply the proposed TDA-Net to a critical application, which is the automated detection of COVID-19 from CXR images. Experimental results showed that the proposed network achieved excellent performance and suggested the applicability of our method in practice.

  60. Analysis of Kolmogorov Flow and Rayleigh–Bénard Convection Using Persistent Homology (2016)

    Miroslav Kramár, Rachel Levanger, Jeffrey Tithof, Balachandra Suri, Mu Xu, Mark Paul, Michael F. Schatz, Konstantin Mischaikow
    Abstract We use persistent homology to build a quantitative understanding of large complex systems that are driven far-from-equilibrium. In particular, we analyze image time series of flow field patterns from numerical simulations of two important problems in fluid dynamics: Kolmogorov flow and Rayleigh–Bénard convection. For each image we compute a persistence diagram to yield a reduced description of the flow field; by applying different metrics to the space of persistence diagrams, we relate characteristic features in persistence diagrams to the geometry of the corresponding flow patterns. We also examine the dynamics of the flow patterns by a second application of persistent homology to the time series of persistence diagrams. We demonstrate that persistent homology provides an effective method both for quotienting out symmetries in families of solutions and for identifying multiscale recurrent dynamics. Our approach is quite general and it is anticipated to be applicable to a broad range of open problems exhibiting complex spatio-temporal behavior.

  61. Confinement in Non-Abelian Lattice Gauge Theory via Persistent Homology (2022)

    Daniel Spitz, Julian M. Urban, Jan M. Pawlowski
    Abstract We investigate the structure of confining and deconfining phases in SU(2) lattice gauge theory via persistent homology, which gives us access to the topology of a hierarchy of combinatorial objects constructed from given data. Specifically, we use filtrations by traced Polyakov loops, topological densities, holonomy Lie algebra fields, as well as electric and magnetic fields. This allows for a comprehensive picture of confinement. In particular, topological densities form spatial lumps which show signatures of the classical probability distribution of instanton-dyons. Signatures of well-separated dyons located at random positions are encoded in holonomy Lie algebra fields, following the semi-classical temperature dependence of the instanton appearance probability. Debye screening discriminating between electric and magnetic fields is visible in persistent homology and pronounced at large gauge coupling. All employed constructions are gauge-invariant without a priori assumptions on the configurations under study. This work showcases the versatility of persistent homology for statistical and quantum physics studies, barely explored to date.

  62. Combining Geometric and Topological Information in Image Segmentation (2019)

    Hengrui Luo, Justin Strait
    Abstract A fundamental problem in computer vision is image segmentation, where the goal is to delineate the boundary of an object in the image. The focus of this work is on the segmentation of grayscale images and its purpose is two-fold. First, we conduct an in-depth study comparing active contour and topology-based methods in a statistical framework, two popular approaches for boundary detection of 2-dimensional images. Certain properties of the image dataset may favor one method over the other, both from an interpretability perspective as well as through evaluation of performance measures. Second, we propose the use of topological knowledge to assist an active contour method, which can potentially incorporate prior shape information. The latter is known to be extremely sensitive to algorithm initialization, and thus, we use a topological model to provide an automatic initialization. In addition, our proposed model can handle objects in images with more complex topological structures, including objects with holes and multiple objects within one image. We demonstrate this on artificially-constructed image datasets from computer vision, as well as real medical image data.

  63. Topological Data Analysis Distinguishes Parameter Regimes in the Anderson-Chaplain Model of Angiogenesis (2021)

    John T. Nardini, Bernadette J. Stolz, Kevin B. Flores, Heather A. Harrington, Helen M. Byrne
    Abstract Angiogenesis is the process by which blood vessels form from pre-existing vessels. It plays a key role in many biological processes, including embryonic development and wound healing, and contributes to many diseases including cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. The structure of the resulting vessel networks determines their ability to deliver nutrients and remove waste products from biological tissues. Here we simulate the Anderson-Chaplain model of angiogenesis at different parameter values and quantify the vessel architectures of the resulting synthetic data. Specifically, we propose a topological data analysis (TDA) pipeline for systematic analysis of the model. TDA is a vibrant and relatively new field of computational mathematics for studying the shape of data. We compute topological and standard descriptors of model simulations generated by different parameter values. We show that TDA of model simulation data stratifies parameter space into regions with similar vessel morphology. The methodologies proposed here are widely applicable to other synthetic and experimental data including wound healing, development, and plant biology.

  64. A Topological Machine Learning Pipeline for Classification (2022)

    Francesco Conti, Davide Moroni, Maria Antonietta Pascali
    Abstract In this work, we develop a pipeline that associates Persistence Diagrams to digital data via the most appropriate filtration for the type of data considered. Using a grid search approach, this pipeline determines optimal representation methods and parameters. The development of such a topological pipeline for Machine Learning involves two crucial steps that strongly affect its performance: firstly, digital data must be represented as an algebraic object with a proper associated filtration in order to compute its topological summary, the Persistence Diagram. Secondly, the persistence diagram must be transformed with suitable representation methods in order to be introduced in a Machine Learning algorithm. We assess the performance of our pipeline, and in parallel, we compare the different representation methods on popular benchmark datasets. This work is a first step toward both an easy and ready-to-use pipeline for data classification using persistent homology and Machine Learning, and to understand the theoretical reasons why, given a dataset and a task to be performed, a pair (filtration, topological representation) is better than another.

  65. From Trees to Barcodes and Back Again: Theoretical and Statistical Perspectives (2020)

    Lida Kanari, Adélie Garin, Kathryn Hess
    Abstract Methods of topological data analysis have been successfully applied in a wide range of fields to provide useful summaries of the structure of complex data sets in terms of topological descriptors, such as persistence diagrams. While there are many powerful techniques for computing topological descriptors, the inverse problem, i.e., recovering the input data from topological descriptors, has proved to be challenging. In this article we study in detail the Topological Morphology Descriptor (TMD), which assigns a persistence diagram to any tree embedded in Euclidean space, and a sort of stochastic inverse to the TMD, the Topological Neuron Synthesis (TNS) algorithm, gaining both theoretical and computational insights into the relation between the two. We propose a new approach to classify barcodes using symmetric groups, which provides a concrete language to formulate our results. We investigate to what extent the TNS recovers a geometric tree from its TMD and describe the effect of different types of noise on the process of tree generation from persistence diagrams. We prove moreover that the TNS algorithm is stable with respect to specific types of noise.

  66. Capturing Dynamics of Time-Varying Data via Topology (2020)

    Lu Xian, Henry Adams, Chad M. Topaz, Lori Ziegelmeier
    Abstract One approach to understanding complex data is to study its shape through the lens of algebraic topology. While the early development of topological data analysis focused primarily on static data, in recent years, theoretical and applied studies have turned to data that varies in time. A time-varying collection of metric spaces as formed, for example, by a moving school of fish or flock of birds, can contain a vast amount of information. There is often a need to simplify or summarize the dynamic behavior. We provide an introduction to topological summaries of time-varying metric spaces including vineyards [17], crocker plots [52], and multiparameter rank functions [34]. We then introduce a new tool to summarize time-varying metric spaces: a crocker stack. Crocker stacks are convenient for visualization, amenable to machine learning, and satisfy a desirable stability property which we prove. We demonstrate the utility of crocker stacks for a parameter identification task involving an influential model of biological aggregations [54]. Altogether, we aim to bring the broader applied mathematics community up-to-date on topological summaries of time-varying metric spaces.

  67. Multidimensional Persistence in Biomolecular Data (2015)

    Kelin Xia, Guo-Wei Wei
    Abstract Persistent homology has emerged as a popular technique for the topological simplification of big data, including biomolecular data. Multidimensional persistence bears considerable promise to bridge the gap between geometry and topology. However, its practical and robust construction has been a challenge. We introduce two families of multidimensional persistence, namely pseudo-multidimensional persistence and multiscale multidimensional persistence. The former is generated via the repeated applications of persistent homology filtration to high dimensional data, such as results from molecular dynamics or partial differential equations. The latter is constructed via isotropic and anisotropic scales that create new simiplicial complexes and associated topological spaces. The utility, robustness and efficiency of the proposed topological methods are demonstrated via protein folding, protein flexibility analysis, the topological denoising of cryo-electron microscopy data, and the scale dependence of nano particles. Topological transition between partial folded and unfolded proteins has been observed in multidimensional persistence. The separation between noise topological signatures and molecular topological fingerprints is achieved by the Laplace-Beltrami flow. The multiscale multidimensional persistent homology reveals relative local features in Betti-0 invariants and the relatively global characteristics of Betti-1 and Betti-2 invariants.

  68. Uncovering the Topology of Time-Varying fMRI Data Using Cubical Persistence (2020)

    Bastian Rieck, Tristan Yates, Christian Bock, Karsten Borgwardt, Guy Wolf, Nicholas Turk-Browne, Smita Krishnaswamy
    Abstract Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a crucial technology for gaining insights into cognitive processes in humans. Data amassed from fMRI measurements result in volumetric data sets that vary over time. However, analysing such data presents a challenge due to the large degree of noise and person-to-person variation in how information is represented in the brain. To address this challenge, we present a novel topological approach that encodes each time point in an fMRI data set as a persistence diagram of topological features, i.e. high-dimensional voids present in the data. This representation naturally does not rely on voxel-by-voxel correspondence and is robust to noise. We show that these time-varying persistence diagrams can be clustered to find meaningful groupings between participants, and that they are also useful in studying within-subject brain state trajectories of subjects performing a particular task. Here, we apply both clustering and trajectory analysis techniques to a group of participants watching the movie 'Partly Cloudy'. We observe significant differences in both brain state trajectories and overall topological activity between adults and children watching the same movie.

  69. A Topological Measurement of Protein Compressibility (2015)

    Marcio Gameiro, Yasuaki Hiraoka, Shunsuke Izumi, Miroslav Kramar, Konstantin Mischaikow, Vidit Nanda
    Abstract In this paper we partially clarify the relation between the compressibility of a protein and its molecular geometric structure. To identify and understand the relevant topological features within a given protein, we model its molecule as an alpha filtration and hence obtain multi-scale insight into the structure of its tunnels and cavities. The persistence diagrams of this alpha filtration capture the sizes and robustness of such tunnels and cavities in a compact and meaningful manner. From these persistence diagrams, we extract a measure of compressibility derived from those topological features whose relevance is suggested by physical and chemical properties. Due to recent advances in combinatorial topology, this measure is efficiently and directly computable from information found in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Our main result establishes a clear linear correlation between the topological measure and the experimentally-determined compressibility of most proteins for which both PDB information and experimental compressibility data are available. Finally, we establish that both the topological measurement and the linear correlation are stable with respect to small perturbations in the input data, such as those arising from experimental errors in compressibility and X-ray crystallography experiments.

  70. Persistent Homology Based Graph Convolution Network for Fine-Grained 3D Shape Segmentation (2021)

    Chi-Chong Wong, Chi-Man Vong
    Abstract Fine-grained 3D segmentation is an important task in 3D object understanding, especially in applications such as intelligent manufacturing or parts analysis for 3D objects. However, many challenges involved in such problem are yet to be solved, such as i) interpreting the complex structures located in different regions for 3D objects; ii) capturing fine-grained structures with sufficient topology correctness. Current deep learning and graph machine learning methods fail to tackle such challenges and thus provide inferior performance in fine-grained 3D analysis. In this work, methods in topological data analysis are incorporated with geometric deep learning model for the task of fine-grained segmentation for 3D objects. We propose a novel neural network model called Persistent Homology based Graph Convolution Network (PHGCN), which i) integrates persistent homology into graph convolution network to capture multi-scale structural information that can accurately represent complex structures for 3D objects; ii) applies a novel Persistence Diagram Loss (ℒPD) that provides sufficient topology correctness for segmentation over the fine-grained structures. Extensive experiments on fine-grained 3D segmentation validate the effectiveness of the proposed PHGCN model and show significant improvements over current state-of-the-art methods.

  71. Topological Data Analysis and Diagnostics of Compressible Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence (2018)

    Irina Makarenko, Paul Bushby, Andrew Fletcher, Robin Henderson, Nikolay Makarenko, Anvar Shukurov
    Abstract The predictions of mean-field electrodynamics can now be probed using direct numerical simulations of random flows and magnetic fields. When modelling astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics, it is important to verify that such simulations are in agreement with observations. One of the main challenges in this area is to identify robust quantitative measures to compare structures found in simulations with those inferred from astrophysical observations. A similar challenge is to compare quantitatively results from different simulations. Topological data analysis offers a range of techniques, including the Betti numbers and persistence diagrams, that can be used to facilitate such a comparison. After describing these tools, we first apply them to synthetic random fields and demonstrate that, when the data are standardized in a straightforward manner, some topological measures are insensitive to either large-scale trends or the resolution of the data. Focusing upon one particular astrophysical example, we apply topological data analysis to H i observations of the turbulent interstellar medium (ISM) in the Milky Way and to recent magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the random, strongly compressible ISM. We stress that these topological techniques are generic and could be applied to any complex, multi-dimensional random field.

  72. Atom-Specific Persistent Homology and Its Application to Protein Flexibility Analysis (2020)

    David Bramer, Guo-Wei Wei
    Abstract Recently, persistent homology has had tremendous success in biomolecular data analysis. It works by examining the topological relationship or connectivity of a group of atoms in a molecule at a variety of scales, then rendering a family of topological representations of the molecule. However, persistent homology is rarely employed for the analysis of atomic properties, such as biomolecular flexibility analysis or B-factor prediction. This work introduces atom-specific persistent homology to provide a local atomic level representation of a molecule via a global topological tool. This is achieved through the construction of a pair of conjugated sets of atoms and corresponding conjugated simplicial complexes, as well as conjugated topological spaces. The difference between the topological invariants of the pair of conjugated sets is measured by Bottleneck and Wasserstein metrics and leads to an atom-specific topological representation of individual atomic properties in a molecule. Atom-specific topological features are integrated with various machine learning algorithms, including gradient boosting trees and convolutional neural network for protein thermal fluctuation analysis and B-factor prediction. Extensive numerical results indicate the proposed method provides a powerful topological tool for analyzing and predicting localized information in complex macromolecules.

  73. Topological Data Analysis of Spatial Patterning in Heterogeneous Cell Populations: Clustering and Sorting With Varying Cell-Cell Adhesion (2023)

    Dhananjay Bhaskar, William Y. Zhang, Alexandria Volkening, Björn Sandstede, Ian Y. Wong
    Abstract Different cell types aggregate and sort into hierarchical architectures during the formation of animal tissues. The resulting spatial organization depends (in part) on the strength of adhesion of one cell type to itself relative to other cell types. However, automated and unsupervised classification of these multicellular spatial patterns remains challenging, particularly given their structural diversity and biological variability. Recent developments based on topological data analysis are intriguing to reveal similarities in tissue architecture, but these methods remain computationally expensive. In this article, we show that multicellular patterns organized from two interacting cell types can be efficiently represented through persistence images. Our optimized combination of dimensionality reduction via autoencoders, combined with hierarchical clustering, achieved high classification accuracy for simulations with constant cell numbers. We further demonstrate that persistence images can be normalized to improve classification for simulations with varying cell numbers due to proliferation. Finally, we systematically consider the importance of incorporating different topological features as well as information about each cell type to improve classification accuracy. We envision that topological machine learning based on persistence images will enable versatile and robust classification of complex tissue architectures that occur in development and disease.

  74. Ghrist Barcoded Video Frames. Application in Detecting Persistent Visual Scene Surface Shapes Captured in Videos (2019)

    Arjuna P. H. Don, James F. Peters
    Abstract This article introduces an application of Ghrist barcodes in the study of persistent Betti numbers derived from vortex nerve complexes found in triangulations of video frames. A Ghrist barcode (also called a persistence barcode) is a topology of data pic- tograph useful in representing the persistence of the features of changing shapes. The basic approach is to introduce a free Abelian group representation of intersecting filled polygons on the barycenters of the triangles of Alexandroff nerves. An Alexandroff nerve is a maximal collection of triangles of a common vertex in the triangulation of a finite, bounded planar region. In our case, the planar region is a video frame. A Betti number is a count of the number of generators is a finite Abelian group. The focus here is on the persistent Betti numbers across sequences of triangulated video frames. Each Betti number is mapped to an entry in a Ghrist barcode. Two main results are given, namely, vortex nerves are Edelsbrunner-Harer nerve complexes and the Betti number of a vortex nerve equals k + 2 for a vortex nerve containing k edges attached between a pair of vortex cycles in the nerve.

  75. Data-Driven and Automatic Surface Texture Analysis Using Persistent Homology (2021)

    Melih C. Yesilli, Firas A. Khasawneh
    Abstract Surface roughness plays an important role in analyzing engineering surfaces. It quantifies the surface topography and can be used to determine whether the resulting surface finish is acceptable or not. Nevertheless, while several existing tools and standards are available for computing surface roughness, these methods rely heavily on user input thus slowing down the analysis and increasing manufacturing costs. Therefore, fast and automatic determination of the roughness level is essential to avoid costs resulting from surfaces with unacceptable finish, and user-intensive analysis. In this study, we propose a Topological Data Analysis (TDA) based approach to classify the roughness level of synthetic surfaces using both their areal images and profiles. We utilize persistent homology from TDA to generate persistence diagrams that encapsulate information on the shape of the surface. We then obtain feature matrices for each surface or profile using Carlsson coordinates, persistence images, and template functions. We compare our results to two widely used methods in the literature: Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Gaussian filtering. The results show that our approach yields mean accuracies as high as 97%. We also show that, in contrast to existing surface analysis tools, our TDA-based approach is fully automatable and provides adaptive feature extraction.

  76. Barcodes Distinguish Morphology of Neuronal Tauopathy (2022)

    David Beers, Despoina Goniotaki, Diane P. Hanger, Alain Goriely, Heather A. Harrington
    Abstract The geometry of neurons is known to be important for their functions. Hence, neurons are often classified by their morphology. Two recent methods, persistent homology and the topological morphology descriptor, assign a morphology descriptor called a barcode to a neuron equipped with a given function, such as the Euclidean distance from the root of the neuron. These barcodes can be converted into matrices called persistence images, which can then be averaged across groups. We show that when the defining function is the path length from the root, both the topological morphology descriptor and persistent homology are equivalent. We further show that persistence images arising from the path length procedure provide an interpretable summary of neuronal morphology. We introduce \topological morphology functions\, a class of functions similar to Sholl functions, that can be recovered from the associated topological morphology descriptor. To demonstrate this topological approach, we compare healthy cortical and hippocampal mouse neurons to those affected by progressive tauopathy. We find a significant difference in the morphology of healthy neurons and those with a tauopathy at a postsymptomatic age. We use persistence images to conclude that the diseased group tends to have neurons with shorter branches as well as fewer branches far from the soma.

  77. Persistence-Based Pooling for Shape Pose Recognition (2016)

    Thomas Bonis, Maks Ovsjanikov, Steve Oudot, Frédéric Chazal
    Abstract In this paper, we propose a novel pooling approach for shape classification and recognition using the bag-of-words pipeline, based on topological persistence, a recent tool from Topological Data Analysis. Our technique extends the standard max-pooling, which summarizes the distribution of a visual feature with a single number, thereby losing any notion of spatiality. Instead, we propose to use topological persistence, and the derived persistence diagrams, to provide significantly more informative and spatially sensitive characterizations of the feature functions, which can lead to better recognition performance. Unfortunately, despite their conceptual appeal, persistence diagrams are difficult to handle, since they are not naturally represented as vectors in Euclidean space and even the standard metric, the bottleneck distance is not easy to compute. Furthermore, classical distances between diagrams, such as the bottleneck and Wasserstein distances, do not allow to build positive definite kernels that can be used for learning. To handle this issue, we provide a novel way to transform persistence diagrams into vectors, in which comparisons are trivial. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our construction on the Non-Rigid 3D Human Models SHREC 2014 dataset, where we show that topological pooling can provide significant improvements over the standard pooling methods for the shape pose recognition within the bag-of-words pipeline.

  78. Stable Topological Summaries for Analyzing the Organization of Cells in a Packed Tissue (2021)

    Nieves Atienza, Maria-Jose Jimenez, Manuel Soriano-Trigueros
    Abstract We use topological data analysis tools for studying the inner organization of cells in segmented images of epithelial tissues. More specifically, for each segmented image, we compute different persistence barcodes, which codify the lifetime of homology classes (persistent homology) along different filtrations (increasing nested sequences of simplicial complexes) that are built from the regions representing the cells in the tissue. We use a complete and well-grounded set of numerical variables over those persistence barcodes, also known as topological summaries. A novel combination of normalization methods for both the set of input segmented images and the produced barcodes allows for the proven stability results for those variables with respect to small changes in the input, as well as invariance to image scale. Our study provides new insights to this problem, such as a possible novel indicator for the development of the drosophila wing disc tissue or the importance of centroids’ distribution to differentiate some tissues from their CVT-path counterpart (a mathematical model of epithelia based on Voronoi diagrams). We also show how the use of topological summaries may improve the classification accuracy of epithelial images using a Random Forest algorithm.

  79. 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.

  80. Optimizing Porosity Detection in Wire Laser Metal Deposition Processes Through Data-Driven AI Classification Techniques (2023)

    Meritxell Gomez-Omella, Jon Flores, Basilio Sierra, Susana Ferreiro, Nicolas Hascoët, Francisco Chinesta
    Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM) is an attractive solution for many companies that produce geometrically complex parts. This process consists of depositing material layer by layer following a sliced CAD geometry. It brings several benefits to manufacturing capabilities, such as design freedom, reduced material waste, and short-run customization. However, one of the current challenges faced by users of the process, mainly in wire laser metal deposition (wLMD), is to avoid defects in the manufactured part, especially the porosity. This defect is caused by extreme conditions and metallurgical transformations of the process. And not only does it directly affect the mechanical performance of the parts, especially the fatigue properties, but it also means an increase in costs due to the inspection tasks to which the manufactured parts must be subjected. This work compares three operational solution approaches, product-centric, based on signal-based feature extraction and Topological Data Analysis together with statistical and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, for the early detection and prediction of porosity failure in a wLMD process. The different forecasting and validation strategies demonstrate the variety of conclusions that can be drawn with different objectives in the analysis of the monitored data in AM problems.

  81. Relational Persistent Homology for Multispecies Data With Application to the Tumor Microenvironment (2023)

    Bernadette J. Stolz, Jagdeep Dhesi, Joshua A. Bull, Heather A. Harrington, Helen M. Byrne, Iris H. R. Yoon
    Abstract Topological data analysis (TDA) is an active field of mathematics for quantifying shape in complex data. Standard methods in TDA such as persistent homology (PH) are typically focused on the analysis of data consisting of a single entity (e.g., cells or molecular species). However, state-of-the-art data collection techniques now generate exquisitely detailed multispecies data, prompting a need for methods that can examine and quantify the relations among them. Such heterogeneous data types arise in many contexts, ranging from biomedical imaging, geospatial analysis, to species ecology. Here, we propose two methods for encoding spatial relations among different data types that are based on Dowker complexes and Witness complexes. We apply the methods to synthetic multispecies data of a tumor microenvironment and analyze topological features that capture relations between different cell types, e.g., blood vessels, macrophages, tumor cells, and necrotic cells. We demonstrate that relational topological features can extract biological insight, including the dominant immune cell phenotype (an important predictor of patient prognosis) and the parameter regimes of a data-generating model. The methods provide a quantitative perspective on the relational analysis of multispecies spatial data, overcome the limits of traditional PH, and are readily computable.

  82. Exploring Surface Texture Quantification in Piezo Vibration Striking Treatment (PVST) Using Topological Measures (2022)

    Melih C. Yesilli, Max M. Chumley, Jisheng Chen, Firas A. Khasawneh, Yang Guo
    Abstract Abstract. Surface texture influences wear and tribological properties of manufactured parts, and it plays a critical role in end-user products. Therefore, quantifying the order or structure of a manufactured surface provides important information on the quality and life expectancy of the product. Although texture can be intentionally introduced to enhance aesthetics or to satisfy a design function, sometimes it is an inevitable byproduct of surface treatment processes such as Piezo Vibration Striking Treatment (PVST). Measures of order for surfaces have been characterized using statistical, spectral, and geometric approaches. For nearly hexagonal lattices, topological tools have also been used to measure the surface order. This paper explores utilizing tools from Topological Data Analysis for measuring surface texture. We compute measures of order based on optical digital microscope images of surfaces treated using PVST. These measures are applied to the grid obtained from estimating the centers of tool impacts, and they quantify the grid’s deviations from the nominal one. Our results show that TDA provides a convenient framework for characterization of pattern type that bypasses some limitations of existing tools such as difficult manual processing of the data and the need for an expert user to analyze and interpret the surface images.

  83. Topological Descriptors for Coral Reef Resilience Using a Stochastic Spatial Model (2022)

    Robert A. McDonald, Rosanna Neuhausler, Martin Robinson, Laurel G. Larsen, Heather A. Harrington, Maria Bruna
    Abstract A complex interplay between species governs the evolution of spatial patterns in ecology. An open problem in the biological sciences is characterizing spatio-temporal data and understanding how changes at the local scale affect global dynamics/behavior. We present a toolkit of multiscale methods and use them to analyze coral reef resilience and dynamics.Here, we extend a well-studied temporal mathematical model of coral reef dynamics to include stochastic and spatial interactions and then generate data to study different ecological scenarios. We present descriptors to characterize patterns in heterogeneous spatio-temporal data surpassing spatially averaged measures. We apply these descriptors to simulated coral data and demonstrate the utility of two topological data analysis techniques--persistent homology and zigzag persistence--for characterizing the spatiotemporal evolution of reefs and generating insight into mechanisms of reef resilience. We show that the introduction of local competition between species leads to the appearance of coral clusters in the reef. Furthermore, we use our analyses to distinguish the temporal dynamics that stem from different initial configurations of coral, showing that the neighborhood composition of coral sites determines their long-term survival. Finally, we use zigzag persistence to quantify spatial behavior in the metastable regime as the level of fish grazing on algae varies and determine which spatial configurations protect coral from extinction in different environments.

  84. 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.

  85. Persistent Homology of Time-Dependent Functional Networks Constructed From Coupled Time Series (2017)

    Bernadette J. Stolz, Heather A. Harrington, Mason A. Porter
    Abstract We use topological data analysis to study “functional networks” that we construct from time-series data from both experimental and synthetic sources. We use persistent homology with a weight rank clique filtration to gain insights into these functional networks, and we use persistence landscapes to interpret our results. Our first example uses time-series output from networks of coupled Kuramoto oscillators. Our second example consists of biological data in the form of functional magnetic resonance imaging data that were acquired from human subjects during a simple motor-learning task in which subjects were monitored for three days during a five-day period. With these examples, we demonstrate that (1) using persistent homology to study functional networks provides fascinating insights into their properties and (2) the position of the features in a filtration can sometimes play a more vital role than persistence in the interpretation of topological features, even though conventionally the latter is used to distinguish between signal and noise. We find that persistent homology can detect differences in synchronization patterns in our data sets over time, giving insight both on changes in community structure in the networks and on increased synchronization between brain regions that form loops in a functional network during motor learning. For the motor-learning data, persistence landscapes also reveal that on average the majority of changes in the network loops take place on the second of the three days of the learning process.

  86. A Topological Framework for Identifying Phenomenological Bifurcations in Stochastic Dynamical Systems (2024)

    Sunia Tanweer, Firas A. Khasawneh, Elizabeth Munch, Joshua R. Tempelman
    Abstract Changes in the parameters of dynamical systems can cause the state of the system to shift between different qualitative regimes. These shifts, known as bifurcations, are critical to study as they can indicate when the system is about to undergo harmful changes in its behavior. In stochastic dynamical systems, there is particular interest in P-type (phenomenological) bifurcations, which can include transitions from a monostable state to multi-stable states, the appearance of stochastic limit cycles and other features in the probability density function (PDF) of the system’s state. Current practices are limited to systems with small state spaces, cannot detect all possible behaviors of the PDFs and mandate human intervention for visually identifying the change in the PDF. In contrast, this study presents a new approach based on Topological Data Analysis that uses superlevel persistence to mathematically quantify P-type bifurcations in stochastic systems through a “homological bifurcation plot”—which shows the changing ranks of 0th and 1st homology groups, through Betti vectors. Using these plots, we demonstrate the successful detection of P-bifurcations on the stochastic Duffing, Raleigh-Vander Pol and Quintic Oscillators given their analytical PDFs, and elaborate on how to generate an estimated homological bifurcation plot given a kernel density estimate (KDE) of these systems by employing a tool for finding topological consistency between PDFs and KDEs.

  87. The Shape of Cancer Relapse: Topological Data Analysis Predicts Recurrence in Paediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (2021)

    Salvador Chulián, Bernadette J. Stolz, Álvaro Martínez-Rubio, Cristina Blázquez Goñi, Juan F. Rodríguez Gutiérrez, Teresa Caballero Velázquez, Águeda Molinos Quintana, Manuel Ramírez Orellana, Ana Castillo Robleda, José Luis Fuster Soler, Alfredo Minguela Puras, María Victoria Martínez Sánchez, María Rosa, Víctor M. Pérez-García, Helen Byrne
    Abstract Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) is the most frequent paediatric cancer. Modern therapies have improved survival rates, but approximately 15-20 % of patients relapse. At present, patients’ risk of relapse are assessed by projecting high-dimensional flow cytometry data onto a subset of biomarkers and manually estimating the shape of this reduced data. Here, we apply methods from topological data analysis (TDA), which quantify shape in data via features such as connected components and loops, to pre-treatment ALL datasets with known outcomes. We combine these fully unsupervised analyses with machine learning to identify features in the pre-treatment data that are prognostic for risk of relapse. We find significant topological differences between relapsing and non-relapsing patients and confirm the predictive power of CD10, CD20, CD38, and CD45. Further, we are able to use the TDA descriptors to predict patients who relapsed. We propose three prognostic pipelines that readily extend to other haematological malignancies. Teaser Topology reveals features in flow cytometry data which predict relapse of patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia

  88. The (Homological) Persistence of Gerrymandering (2021)

    Moon Duchin, Tom Needham, Thomas Weighill
    Abstract \textlessp style='text-indent:20px;'\textgreaterWe apply persistent homology, the dominant tool from the field of topological data analysis, to study electoral redistricting. We begin by combining geographic and electoral data from a districting plan to produce a persistence diagram. Then, to see beyond a particular plan and understand the possibilities afforded by the choices made in redistricting, we build methods to visualize and analyze large ensembles of alternative plans. Our detailed case studies use zero-dimensional homology (persistent components) of filtered graphs constructed from voting data to analyze redistricting in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. We find that, across large ensembles of partitions, the features cluster in the persistence diagrams in a way that corresponds strongly to geographic location, so that we can construct an average diagram for an ensemble, with each point identified with a geographical region. Using this localization lets us produce zonings of each state at Congressional, state Senate, and state House scales, show the regional non-uniformity of election shifts, and identify attributes of partitions that tend to correspond to partisan advantage.\textless/p\textgreater\textlessp style='text-indent:20px;'\textgreaterThe methods here are set up to be broadly applicable to the use of TDA on large ensembles of data. Many studies will benefit from interpretable summaries of large sets of samples or simulations, and the work here on localization and zoning will readily generalize to other partition problems, which are abundant in scientific applications. For the mathematically and politically rich problem of redistricting in particular, TDA provides a powerful and elegant summarization tool whose findings will be useful for practitioners.\textless/p\textgreater

  89. Pattern Characterization Using Topological Data Analysis: Application to Piezo Vibration Striking Treatment (2023)

    Max M. Chumley, Melih C. Yesilli, Jisheng Chen, Firas A. Khasawneh, Yang Guo
    Abstract Quantifying patterns in visual or tactile textures provides important information about the process or phenomena that generated these patterns. In manufacturing, these patterns can be intentionally introduced as a design feature, or they can be a byproduct of a specific process. Since surface texture has significant impact on the mechanical properties and the longevity of the workpiece, it is important to develop tools for quantifying surface patterns and, when applicable, comparing them to their nominal counterparts. While existing tools may be able to indicate the existence of a pattern, they typically do not provide more information about the pattern structure, or how much it deviates from a nominal pattern. Further, prior works do not provide automatic or algorithmic approaches for quantifying other pattern characteristics such as depths’ consistency, and variations in the pattern motifs at different level sets. This paper leverages persistent homology from Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to derive noise-robust scores for quantifying motifs’ depth and roundness in a pattern. Specifically, sublevel persistence is used to derive scores that quantify the consistency of indentation depths at any level set in Piezo Vibration Striking Treatment (PVST) surfaces. Moreover, we combine sublevel persistence with the distance transform to quantify the consistency of the indentation radii, and to compare them with the nominal ones. Although the tool in our PVST experiments had a semi-spherical profile, we present a generalization of our approach to tools/motifs of arbitrary shapes thus making our method applicable to other pattern-generating manufacturing processes.

  90. Testing Topological Data Analysis for Condition Monitoring of Wind Turbines (2024)

    Simone Casolo, Alexander Stasik, Zhenyou Zhang, Signe Riemer-Sørensen
    Abstract We present an investigation of how topological data analysis (TDA) can be applied to condition-based monitoring (CBM) of wind turbines for energy generation.TDA is a branch of data analysis focusing on extracting mean- ingful information from complex datasets by analyzing their structure in state space and computing their underlying topo- logical features. By representing data in a high-dimensional state space, TDA enables the identification of patterns, anoma- lies, and trends in the data that may not be apparent through traditional signal processing methods. For this study, wind turbine data was acquired from a wind park in Norway via standard vibration sensors at different lo- cations of the turbine’s gearbox. Both the vibration acceler- ation data and its frequency spectra were recorded at infre- quent intervals for a few seconds at high frequency and fail- ure events were labelled as either gear-tooth or ball-bearing failures. The data processing and analysis are based on a pipeline where the time series data is first split into intervals and then transformed into multi-dimensional point clouds via a time-delay embedding. The shape of the point cloud is an- alyzed with topological methods such as persistent homol- ogy to generate topology-based key health indicators based on Betti numbers, information entropy and signal persistence. Such indicators are tested for CBM and diagnosis (fault de- tection) to identify faults in wind turbines and classify them accordingly. Topological indicators are shown to be an in- teresting alternative for failure identification and diagnosis of operational failures in wind turbines.

  91. Steinhaus Filtration and Stable Paths in the Mapper (2020)

    Dustin L. Arendt, Matthew Broussard, Bala Krishnamoorthy, Nathaniel Saul
    Abstract Two central concepts from topological data analysis are persistence and the Mapper construction. Persistence employs a sequence of objects built on data called a filtration. A Mapper produces insightful summaries of data, and has found widespread applications in diverse areas. We define a new filtration called the cover filtration built from a single cover based on a generalized Steinhaus distance, which is a generalization of Jaccard distance. We prove a stability result: the cover filtrations of two covers are \$\alpha/m\$ interleaved, where \$\alpha\$ is a bound on bottleneck distance between covers and \$m\$ is the size of smallest set in either cover. We also show our construction is equivalent to the Cech filtration under certain settings, and the Vietoris-Rips filtration completely determines the cover filtration in all cases. We then develop a theory for stable paths within this filtration. Unlike standard results on stability in topological persistence, our definition of path stability aligns exactly with the above result on stability of cover filtration. We demonstrate how our framework can be employed in a variety of applications where a metric is not obvious but a cover is readily available. First we present a new model for recommendation systems using cover filtration. For an explicit example, stable paths identified on a movies data set represent sequences of movies constituting gentle transitions from one genre to another. As a second application in explainable machine learning, we apply the Mapper for model induction, providing explanations in the form of paths between subpopulations. Stable paths in the Mapper from a supervised machine learning model trained on the FashionMNIST data set provide improved explanations of relationships between subpopulations of images.

  92. Multivariate Data Analysis Using Persistence-Based Filtering and Topological Signatures (2012)

    B. Rieck, H. Mara, H. Leitte
    Abstract The extraction of significant structures in arbitrary high-dimensional data sets is a challenging task. Moreover, classifying data points as noise in order to reduce a data set bears special relevance for many application domains. Standard methods such as clustering serve to reduce problem complexity by providing the user with classes of similar entities. However, they usually do not highlight relations between different entities and require a stopping criterion, e.g. the number of clusters to be detected. In this paper, we present a visualization pipeline based on recent advancements in algebraic topology. More precisely, we employ methods from persistent homology that enable topological data analysis on high-dimensional data sets. Our pipeline inherently copes with noisy data and data sets of arbitrary dimensions. It extracts central structures of a data set in a hierarchical manner by using a persistence-based filtering algorithm that is theoretically well-founded. We furthermore introduce persistence rings, a novel visualization technique for a class of topological features-the persistence intervals-of large data sets. Persistence rings provide a unique topological signature of a data set, which helps in recognizing similarities. In addition, we provide interactive visualization techniques that assist the user in evaluating the parameter space of our method in order to extract relevant structures. We describe and evaluate our analysis pipeline by means of two very distinct classes of data sets: First, a class of synthetic data sets containing topological objects is employed to highlight the interaction capabilities of our method. Second, in order to affirm the utility of our technique, we analyse a class of high-dimensional real-world data sets arising from current research in cultural heritage.

  93. Understanding Diffraction Patterns of Glassy, Liquid and Amorphous Materials via Persistent Homology Analyses (2019)

    Yohei Onodera, Shinji Kohara, Shuta Tahara, Atsunobu Masuno, Hiroyuki Inoue, Motoki Shiga, Akihiko Hirata, Koichi Tsuchiya, Yasuaki Hiraoka, Ippei Obayashi, Koji Ohara, Akitoshi Mizuno, Osami Sakata
    Abstract The structure of glassy, liquid, and amorphous materials is still not well understood, due to the insufficient structural information from diffraction data. In this article, attempts are made to understand the origin of diffraction peaks, particularly of the first sharp diffraction peak (FSDP, Q1), the principal peak (PP, Q2), and the third peak (Q3), observed in the measured diffraction patterns of disordered materials whose structure contains tetrahedral motifs. It is confirmed that the FSDP (Q1) is not a signature of the formation of a network, because an FSDP is observed in tetrahedral molecular liquids. It is found that the PP (Q2) reflects orientational correlations of tetrahedra. Q3, that can be observed in all disordered materials, even in common liquid metals, stems from simple pair correlations. Moreover, information on the topology of disordered materials was revealed by utilizing persistent homology analyses. The persistence diagram of silica (SiO2) glass suggests that the shape of rings in the glass is similar not only to those in the crystalline phase with comparable density (α-cristobalite), but also to rings present in crystalline phases with higher density (α-quartz and coesite); this is thought to be the signature of disorder. Furthermore, we have succeeded in revealing the differences, in terms of persistent homology, between tetrahedral networks and tetrahedral molecular liquids, and the difference/similarity between liquid and amorphous (glassy) states. Our series of analyses demonstrated that a combination of diffraction data and persistent homology analyses is a useful tool for allowing us to uncover structural features hidden in halo pattern of disordered materials.

  94. Felix: A Topology Based Framework for Visual Exploration of Cosmic Filaments (2016)

    Nithin Shivshankar, Pratyush Pranav, Vijay Natarajan, Rien van de Weygaert, E. G. Patrick Bos, Steven Rieder
    Abstract The large-scale structure of the universe is comprised of virialized blob-like clusters, linear filaments, sheet-like walls and huge near empty three-dimensional voids. Characterizing the large scale universe is essential to our understanding of the formation and evolution of galaxies. The density range of clusters, walls and voids are relatively well separated, when compared to filaments, which span a relatively larger range. The large scale filamentary network thus forms an intricate part of the cosmic web. In this paper, we describe Felix, a topology based framework for visual exploration of filaments in the cosmic web. The filamentary structure is represented by the ascending manifold geometry of the 2-saddles in the Morse-Smale complex of the density field. We generate a hierarchy of Morse-Smale complexes and query for filaments based on the density ranges at the end points of the filaments. The query is processed efficiently over the entire hierarchical Morse-Smale complex, allowing for interactive visualization. We apply Felix to computer simulations based on the heuristic Voronoi kinematic model and the standard \$\Lambda\$CDM cosmology, and demonstrate its usefulness through two case studies. First, we extract cosmic filaments within and across cluster like regions in Voronoi kinematic simulation datasets. We demonstrate that we produce similar results to existing structure finders. Filaments that form the spine of the cosmic web, which exist in high density regions in the current epoch, are isolated using Felix. Also, filaments present in void-like regions are isolated and visualized. These filamentary structures are often over shadowed by higher density range filaments and are not easily characterizable and extractable using other filament extraction methodologies.

  95. Algebraic Topology-Based Machine Learning Using MRI Predicts Outcomes in Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (2022)

    Yashbir Singh, William A. Jons, John E. Eaton, Mette Vesterhus, Tom Karlsen, Ida Bjoerk, Andreas Abildgaard, Kristin Kaasen Jorgensen, Folseraas Trine, Derek Little, Aliya F. Gulamhusein, Kosta Petrovic, Anne Negard, Gian Marco Conte, Joseph D. Sobek, Jaidip Jagtap, Sudhakar K. Venkatesh, Gregory J. Gores, Nicholas F. LaRusso, Konstantinos N. Lazaridis, Bradley J. Erickson
    Abstract Background: Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is a chronic cholestatic liver disease that can lead to cirrhosis and hepatic decompensation. However, predicting future outcomes in patients with PSC is challenging. Our aim was to extract magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features that predict the development of hepatic decompensation by applying algebraic topology-based machine learning (ML). Methods: We conducted a retrospective multicenter study among adults with large duct PSC who underwent MRI. A topological data analysis-inspired nonlinear framework was used to predict the risk of hepatic decompensation, which was motivated by algebraic topology theory-based ML. The topological representations (persistence images) were employed as input for classifcation to predict who developed early hepatic decompensation within one year after their baseline MRI. Results: We reviewed 590 patients; 298 were excluded due to poor image quality or inadequate liver coverage, leaving 292 potentially eligible subjects, of which 169 subjects were included in the study. We trained our model using contrast-enhanced delayed phase T1-weighted images on a single center derivation cohort consisting of 54 patients (hepatic decompensation, n = 21; no hepatic decompensation, n = 33) and a multicenter independent validation cohort of 115 individuals (hepatic decompensation, n = 31; no hepatic decompensation, n = 84). When our model was applied in the independent validation cohort, it remained predictive of early hepatic decompensation (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve = 0.84). Conclusions: Algebraic topology-based ML is a methodological approach that can predict outcomes in patients with PSC and has the potential for application in other chronic liver diseases

  96. Persistent Homology of the Cosmic Web. I: Hierarchical Topology in \$\Lambda\$CDM Cosmologies (2021)

    Georg Wilding, Keimpe Nevenzeel, Rien van de Weygaert, Gert Vegter, Pratyush Pranav, Bernard J. T. Jones, Konstantinos Efstathiou, Job Feldbrugge
    Abstract Using a set of \$\Lambda\$CDM simulations of cosmic structure formation, we study the evolving connectivity and changing topological structure of the cosmic web using state-of-the-art tools of multiscale topological data analysis (TDA). We follow the development of the cosmic web topology in terms of the evolution of Betti number curves and feature persistence diagrams of the three (topological) classes of structural features: matter concentrations, filaments and tunnels, and voids. The Betti curves specify the prominence of features as a function of density level, and their evolution with cosmic epoch reflects the changing network connections between these structural features. The persistence diagrams quantify the longevity and stability of topological features. In this study we establish, for the first time, the link between persistence diagrams, the features they show, and the gravitationally driven cosmic structure formation process. By following the diagrams' development over cosmic time, the link between the multiscale topology of the cosmic web and the hierarchical buildup of cosmic structure is established. The sharp apexes in the diagrams are intimately related to key transitions in the structure formation process. The apex in the matter concentration diagrams coincides with the density level at which, typically, they detach from the Hubble expansion and begin to collapse. At that level many individual islands merge to form the network of the cosmic web and a large number of filaments and tunnels emerge to establish its connecting bridges. The location trends of the apex possess a self-similar character that can be related to the cosmic web's hierarchical buildup. We find that persistence diagrams provide a significantly higher and more profound level of information on the structure formation process than more global summary statistics like Euler characteristic or Betti numbers.

  97. Determining Clinically Relevant Features in Cytometry Data Using Persistent Homology (2022)

    Soham Mukherjee, Darren Wethington, Tamal K. Dey, Jayajit Das
    Abstract Cytometry experiments yield high-dimensional point cloud data that is difficult to interpret manually. Boolean gating techniques coupled with comparisons of relative abundances of cellular subsets is the current standard for cytometry data analysis. However, this approach is unable to capture more subtle topological features hidden in data, especially if those features are further masked by data transforms or significant batch effects or donor-to-donor variations in clinical data. We present that persistent homology, a mathematical structure that summarizes the topological features, can distinguish different sources of data, such as from groups of healthy donors or patients, effectively. Analysis of publicly available cytometry data describing non-naïve CD8+ T cells in COVID-19 patients and healthy controls shows that systematic structural differences exist between single cell protein expressions in COVID-19 patients and healthy controls. We identify proteins of interest by a decision-tree based classifier, sample points randomly and compute persistence diagrams from these sampled points. The resulting persistence diagrams identify regions in cytometry datasets of varying density and identify protruded structures such as ‘elbows’. We compute Wasserstein distances between these persistence diagrams for random pairs of healthy controls and COVID-19 patients and find that systematic structural differences exist between COVID-19 patients and healthy controls in the expression data for T-bet, Eomes, and Ki-67. Further analysis shows that expression of T-bet and Eomes are significantly downregulated in COVID-19 patient non-naïve CD8+ T cells compared to healthy controls. This counter-intuitive finding may indicate that canonical effector CD8+ T cells are less prevalent in COVID-19 patients than healthy controls. This method is applicable to any cytometry dataset for discovering novel insights through topological data analysis which may be difficult to ascertain otherwise with a standard gating strategy or existing bioinformatic tools.

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  98. Quantification of the Immune Content in Neuroblastoma: Deep Learning and Topological Data Analysis in Digital Pathology (2021)

    Nicole Bussola, Bruno Papa, Ombretta Melaiu, Aurora Castellano, Doriana Fruci, Giuseppe Jurman
    Abstract We introduce here a novel machine learning (ML) framework to address the issue of the quantitative assessment of the immune content in neuroblastoma (NB) specimens. First, the EUNet, a U-Net with an EfficientNet encoder, is trained to detect lymphocytes on tissue digital slides stained with the CD3 T-cell marker. The training set consists of 3782 images extracted from an original collection of 54 whole slide images (WSIs), manually annotated for a total of 73,751 lymphocytes. Resampling strategies, data augmentation, and transfer learning approaches are adopted to warrant reproducibility and to reduce the risk of overfitting and selection bias. Topological data analysis (TDA) is then used to define activation maps from different layers of the neural network at different stages of the training process, described by persistence diagrams (PD) and Betti curves. TDA is further integrated with the uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) dimensionality reduction and the hierarchical density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (HDBSCAN) algorithm for clustering, by the deep features, the relevant subgroups and structures, across different levels of the neural network. Finally, the recent TwoNN approach is leveraged to study the variation of the intrinsic dimensionality of the U-Net model. As the main task, the proposed pipeline is employed to evaluate the density of lymphocytes over the whole tissue area of the WSIs. The model achieves good results with mean absolute error 3.1 on test set, showing significant agreement between densities estimated by our EUNet model and by trained pathologists, thus indicating the potentialities of a promising new strategy in the quantification of the immune content in NB specimens. Moreover, the UMAP algorithm unveiled interesting patterns compatible with pathological characteristics, also highlighting novel insights into the dynamics of the intrinsic dataset dimensionality at different stages of the training process. All the experiments were run on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

  99. Segmentation of Biomedical Images by a Computational Topology Framework (2017)

    Rodrigo Rojas Moraleda, Wei Xiong, Niels Halama, Katja Breitkopf-Heinlein, Steven Steven, Luis Salinas, Dieter W. Heermann, Nektarios A. Valous
    Abstract The segmentation of cell nuclei is an important step towards the automated analysis of histological images. The presence of a large number of nuclei in whole-slide images necessitates methods that are computationally tractable in addition to being effective. In this work, a method is developed for the robust segmentation of cell nuclei in histological images based on the principles of persistent homology. More specifically, an abstract simplicial homology approach for image segmentation is established. Essentially, the approach deals with the persistence of disconnected sets in the image, thus identifying salient regions that express patterns of persistence. By introducing an image representation based on topological features, the task of segmentation is less dependent on variations of color or texture. This results in a novel approach that generalizes well and provides stable performance. The method conceptualizes regions of interest (cell nuclei) pertinent to their topological features in a successful manner. The time cost of the proposed approach is lower-bounded by an almost linear behavior and upper-bounded by O(n2) in a worst-case scenario. Time complexity matches a quasilinear behavior which is O(n1+ɛ) for ε \textless 1. Images acquired from histological sections of liver tissue are used as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach. The histological landscape consists of hepatocytes and non-parenchymal cells. The accuracy of the proposed methodology is verified against an automated workflow created by the output of a conventional filter bank (validated by experts) and the supervised training of a random forest classifier. The results are obtained on a per-object basis. The proposed workflow successfully detected both hepatocyte and non-parenchymal cell nuclei with an accuracy of 84.6%, and hepatocyte cell nuclei only with an accuracy of 86.2%. A public histological dataset with supplied ground-truth data is also used for evaluating the performance of the proposed approach (accuracy: 94.5%). Further validations are carried out with a publicly available dataset and ground-truth data from the Gland Segmentation in Colon Histology Images Challenge (GlaS) contest. The proposed method is useful for obtaining unsupervised robust initial segmentations that can be further integrated in image/data processing and management pipelines. The development of a fully automated system supporting a human expert provides tangible benefits in the context of clinical decision-making.