The depth poset of a filtered Lefschetz complex reflects the dependencies between the cancellations of different shallow birth-death pairs. Using the fast algorithms for computing the depth poset in the present work and for updating the persistence diagram under transpositions (Vineyard persistence), we give a complete case analysis of how transpositions of cells in the filter affect the depth poset. In addition, we present statistics on the depth poset for random point data and its sensitivity to the transpositions that occur in random straight-line homotopies.

Persistence modules (defined as a sequence of vector spaces and linear maps between them) are a key tool in topological data analysis. They are easy to interpret and fast to compute. However, when considering persistence maps (i.e. maps between persistence modules), these properties are lost. We propose a new invariant for persistence maps consisting of a partial matching such that: it is easy to interpret, it is more discriminative than the image of the persistence map, and can be calculated with cubical complexity.

We study how to obtain partial matchings using the block function Mf, induced by a morphism f between persistence modules. Mf is defined algebraically and is linear with respect to direct sums of morphisms. We study some interesting properties of Mf, and provide a way of obtaining Mf using matrix operations.

Attempts to incorporate topological information in supervised learning tasks have resulted in the creation of several techniques for vectorizing persistent homology barcodes. In this paper, we study thirteen such methods. Besides describing an organizational framework for these methods, we comprehensively benchmark them against three well-known classification tasks. Surprisingly, we discover that the best-performing method is a simple vectorization, which consists only of a few elementary summary statistics. Finally, we provide a convenient web application which has been designed to facilitate exploration and experimentation with various vectorization methods.