Special Session 122: Topological Data Analysis Theory, Algorithms, and Applications

Topological optimization with birth and death cochains
Ling Zhou
Duke University
USA
Co-Author(s):    Thomas Weighill
Abstract:
We introduce the notion of birth and death cochains as generalized versions of birth and death simplices in persistent cohomology. We show that birth and death cochains (unlike birth and death simplices) are always unique for a given persistent cohomology class. We use birth and death cochains to define birth and death content as generalizations of birth and death times. We then demonstrate the advantages of using that birth and death content as loss functions on a variety of topological optimization tasks with point clouds, time series and scalar fields. We close with a novel application of topological optimization to a dataset of arctic ice images.