Abstract Recently, p -presentation distances for $$p\in [1,\infty ]$$ p ∈ [ 1 , ∞ ] were introduced for merge trees and multiparameter persistence modules as more sensitive variations of the respective interleaving distances ( $$p=\infty )$$ p = ∞ ) . It is well-known that computing the interleaving distance is NP-hard in both cases. We extend this result by showing that computing the p -presentation distance is NP-hard for all $$p\in [1,\infty )$$ p ∈ [ 1 , ∞ ) for both merge trees and t -parameter persistence modules for any $$t\ge 2$$ t ≥ 2 . Though the details differ, both proofs follow the same novel strategy, suggesting that our approach can be adapted to proving the NP-hardness of other distances based on sums or p -norms.

Persistent homology (PH) provides topological descriptors for geometric data, such as weighted graphs, which are interpretable, stable to perturbations, and invariant under, e.g., relabeling. Most applications of PH focus on the one-parameter case---where the descriptors summarize the changes in topology of data as it is filtered by a single quantity of interest---and there is now a wide array of methods enabling the use of one-parameter PH descriptors in data science, which rely on the stable vectorization of these descriptors as elements of a Hilbert space. Although the multiparameter PH (MPH) of data that is filtered by several quantities of interest encodes much richer information than its one-parameter counterpart, the scarceness of stability results for MPH descriptors has so far limited the available options for the stable vectorization of MPH. In this paper, we aim to bring together the best of both worlds by showing how the interpretation of signed barcodes---a recent family of MPH descriptors---as signed Radon measures leads to natural extensions of vectorization strategies from one parameter to multiple parameters. The resulting feature vectors are easy to define and to compute, and provably stable. While, as a proof of concept, we focus on simple choices of signed barcodes and vectorizations, we already see notable performance improvements when comparing our feature vectors to state-of-the-art topology-based methods on various types of data.

In this paper we introduce the signed barcode, a new visual representation of the global structure of the rank invariant of a multi-parameter persistence module or, more generally, of a poset representation. Like its unsigned counterpart in one-parameter persistence, the signed barcode encodes the rank invariant as a ℤ-linear combination of rank invariants of indicator modules supported on segments in the poset. It can also be enriched to encode the generalized rank invariant as a ℤ-linear combination of generalized rank invariants in fixed classes of interval modules. In the paper we develop the theory behind these rank decompositions, showing under what conditions they exist and are unique - so the signed barcode is canonically defined. We also illustrate the contribution of the signed barcode to the exploration of multi-parameter persistence modules through a practical example.

This paper addresses two questions: (a) can we identify a sensible class of 2-parameter persistence modules on which the rank invariant is complete? (b) can we determine efficiently whether a given 2-parameter persistence module belongs to this class? We provide positive answers to both questions, and our class of interest is that of rectangle-decomposable modules. Our contributions include: on the one hand, a proof that the rank invariant is complete on rectangle-decomposable modules, together with an inclusion-exclusion formula for counting the multiplicities of the summands; on the other hand, algorithms to check whether a module induced in homology by a bifiltration is rectangle-decomposable, and to decompose it in the affirmative, with a better complexity than state-of-the-art decomposition methods for general 2-parameter persistence modules. Our algorithms are backed up by a new structure theorem, whereby a 2-parameter persistence module is rectangle-decomposable if, and only if, its restrictions to squares are. This local characterization is key to the efficiency of our algorithms, and it generalizes previous conditions derived for the smaller class of block-decomposable modules. It also admits an algebraic formulation that turns out to be a weaker version of the one for block-decomposability. By contrast, we show that general interval-decomposability does not admit such a local characterization, even when locality is understood in a broad sense. Our analysis focuses on the case of modules indexed over finite grids, the more general cases are left as future work.

International audience

The interleaving distance is arguably the most prominent distance measure in topological data analysis. In this paper, we provide bounds on the computational complexity of determining the interleaving distance in several settings. We show that the interleaving distance is NP-hard to compute for persistence modules valued in the category of vector spaces. In the specific setting of multidimensional persistent homology we show that the problem is at least as hard as a matrix invertibility problem. Furthermore, this allows us to conclude that the interleaving distance of interval decomposable modules depends on the characteristic of the field. Persistence modules valued in the category of sets are also studied. As a corollary, we obtain that the isomorphism problem for Reeb graphs is graph isomorphism complete.

This paper presents an improved data hiding technique based on BCH (n,k,t) coding. The proposed embedder hides data into a block of input data by modifying some coefficients in the block in order to null the syndrome. The proposed embedder can hide data with less computational time and less storage capacity compared to the existing methods. The complexity of the proposed method is linear while that of other methods are exponential for any block sizen. Thus, it is easy to extend this method to a largen. The BCH syndrome coding for steganography is now viable ascribed to the reduced complexity and its simplicity of the proposed embedder.