Pritam et al. initiated a line of work that introduces the concept of dominated edges and vertices to reduce the size of (bi)filtered undirected graphs, without compromising their topological features. In this article, we extend these ideas to the setting of directed filtered graphs. We provide a characterization of vertex and edge domination in terms of the local neighborhood structure of the directed graph. Building on this, we adapt the filtration reduction algorithm of [17] to the directed case, and demonstrate through experiments that this often yields considerable improvements in both runtime and memory consumption in the computational pipeline for homology and persistent homology. As with its undirected counterpart, our algorithm operates directly on the filtered directed graph.

We present a topological framework for analyzing neural time series that integrates Transfer Entropy (TE) with directed Persistent Homology (PH) to characterize information flow in spiking neural systems. TE quantifies directional influence between neurons, producing weighted, directed graphs that reflect dynamic interactions. These graphs are then analyzed using PH, enabling assessment of topological complexity across multiple structural scales and dimensions. We apply this TE+PH pipeline to synthetic spiking networks trained on logic gate tasks, image-classification networks exposed to structured and perturbed inputs, and mouse cortical recordings annotated with behavioral events. Across all settings, the resulting topological signatures reveal distinctions in task complexity, stimulus structure, and behavioral regime. Higher-dimensional features become more prominent in complex or noisy conditions, reflecting interaction patterns that extend beyond pairwise connectivity. Our findings offer a principled approach to mapping directed information flow onto global organizational patterns in both artificial and biological neural systems. The framework is generalizable and interpretable, making it well suited for neural systems with time-resolved and binary spiking data.

International audience

Bifiltered graphs are a versatile tool for modelling relations between data points across multiple grades of a two- dimensional scale. They are especially popular in topological data analysis, where the homological properties of the induced clique complexes are studied. To reduce the large size of these clique complexes, we identify filtration-dominated edges of the graph, whose removal preserves the relevant topological properties. We give two algorithms to detect filtration-dominated edges in a bifiltered graph and analyze their complexity. These two algorithms work directly on the bifiltered graph, without first extracting the clique complexes, which are generally much bigger. We present extensive experimental evaluation which shows that in most cases, more than 90% of the edges can be removed. In turn, we demonstrate that this often leads to a substantial speedup, and reduction in the memory usage, of the computational pipeline of multiparameter topological data analysis.

Boissonnat and Pritam introduced an algorithm to reduce a filtration of flag (or clique) complexes, which can in particular speed up the computation of its persistent homology. They used so-called edge collapse to reduce the input flag filtration and their reduction method required only the 1-skeleton of the filtration. In this paper we revisit the use of edge collapse for efficient computation of persistent homology. We first give a simple and intuitive explanation of the principles underlying that algorithm. This in turn allows us to propose various extensions including a zigzag filtration simplification algorithm. We finally show some experiments to better understand how it behaves.

In this article, we extend the notions of dominated vertex and strong collapse of a simplicial complex as introduced by J. Barmak and E. Miniam. We say that a simplex (of any dimension) is dominated if its link is a simplicial cone. Domination of edges appears to be a very powerful concept, especially when applied to flag complexes. We show that edge collapse (removal of dominated edges) in a flag complex can be performed using only the 1-skeleton of the complex. Furthermore, the residual complex is a flag complex as well. Next we show that, similar to the case of strong collapses, we can use edge collapses to reduce a flag filtration ℱ to a smaller flag filtration ℱ^c with the same persistence. Here again, we only use the 1-skeletons of the complexes. The resulting method to compute ℱ^c is simple and extremely efficient and, when used as a preprocessing for persistence computation, leads to gains of several orders of magnitude w.r.t the state-of-the-art methods (including our previous approach using strong collapse). The method is exact, irrespective of dimension, and improves performance of persistence computation even in low dimensions. This is demonstrated by numerous experiments on publicly available data.

In this article, we focus on the problem of computing Persistent Homology of a flag tower, i.e. a sequence of flag complexes connected by simplicial maps. We show that if we restrict the class of simplicial complexes to flag complexes, we can achieve decisive improvement in terms of time and space complexities with respect to previous work. We show that strong collapses of flag complexes can be computed in time O(k^2v^2) where v is the number of vertices of the complex and k is the maximal degree of its graph. Moreover we can strong collapse a flag complex knowing only its 1-skeleton and the resulting complex is also a flag complex. When we strong collapse the complexes in a flag tower, we obtain a reduced sequence that is also a flag tower we call the core flag tower. We then convert the core flag tower to an equivalent filtration to compute its PH. Here again, we only use the 1-skeletons of the complexes. The resulting method is simple and extremely efficient.

In this article, we focus on the problem of computing Persistent Homology of a flag tower, i.e. a sequence of flag complexes connected by simplicial maps. We show that if we restrict the class of simplicial complexes to flag complexes, we can achieve decisive improvement in terms of time and space complexities with respect to previous work. We show that strong collapses of flag complexes can be computed in time O(k^2v^2) where v is the number of vertices of the complex and k is the maximal degree of its graph. Moreover we can strong collapse a flag complex knowing only its 1-skeleton and the resulting complex is also a flag complex. When we strong collapse the complexes in a flag tower, we obtain a reduced sequence that is also a flag tower we call the core flag tower. We then convert the core flag tower to an equivalent filtration to compute its PH. Here again, we only use the 1-skeletons of the complexes. The resulting method is simple and extremely efficient.

Small-world networks have been one of the most influential concepts in complex systems science, partly due to their prevalence in naturally occurring networks. It is often suggested that this prevalence is due to an inherent capability to store and transfer information efficiently. We perform an ensemble investigation of the computational capabilities of small-world networks as compared to ordered and random topologies. To generate dynamic behavior for this experiment, we imbue the nodes in these networks with random Boolean functions. We find that the ordered phase of the dynamics (low activity in dynamics) and topologies with low randomness are dominated by information storage, while the chaotic phase (high activity in dynamics) and topologies with high randomness are dominated by information transfer. Information storage and information transfer are somewhat balanced (crossed over) near the small-world regime, providing quantitative evidence that small-world networks do indeed have a propensity to combine comparably large information storage and transfer capacity.