Cover Learning for Large-Scale Topology Representation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Scoccola, Luis, Lim, Uzu, Harrington, Heather A.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Scoccola, Luis
Lim, Uzu
Harrington, Heather A.
author_facet Scoccola, Luis
Lim, Uzu
Harrington, Heather A.
contents Classical unsupervised learning methods like clustering and linear dimensionality reduction parametrize large-scale geometry when it is discrete or linear, while more modern methods from manifold learning find low dimensional representation or infer local geometry by constructing a graph on the input data. More recently, topological data analysis popularized the use of simplicial complexes to represent data topology with two main methodologies: topological inference with geometric complexes and large-scale topology visualization with Mapper graphs -- central to these is the nerve construction from topology, which builds a simplicial complex given a cover of a space by subsets. While successful, these have limitations: geometric complexes scale poorly with data size, and Mapper graphs can be hard to tune and only contain low dimensional information. In this paper, we propose to study the problem of learning covers in its own right, and from the perspective of optimization. We describe a method for learning topologically-faithful covers of geometric datasets, and show that the simplicial complexes thus obtained can outperform standard topological inference approaches in terms of size, and Mapper-type algorithms in terms of representation of large-scale topology.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09767
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cover Learning for Large-Scale Topology Representation
Scoccola, Luis
Lim, Uzu
Harrington, Heather A.
Machine Learning
Computational Geometry
Algebraic Topology
Classical unsupervised learning methods like clustering and linear dimensionality reduction parametrize large-scale geometry when it is discrete or linear, while more modern methods from manifold learning find low dimensional representation or infer local geometry by constructing a graph on the input data. More recently, topological data analysis popularized the use of simplicial complexes to represent data topology with two main methodologies: topological inference with geometric complexes and large-scale topology visualization with Mapper graphs -- central to these is the nerve construction from topology, which builds a simplicial complex given a cover of a space by subsets. While successful, these have limitations: geometric complexes scale poorly with data size, and Mapper graphs can be hard to tune and only contain low dimensional information. In this paper, we propose to study the problem of learning covers in its own right, and from the perspective of optimization. We describe a method for learning topologically-faithful covers of geometric datasets, and show that the simplicial complexes thus obtained can outperform standard topological inference approaches in terms of size, and Mapper-type algorithms in terms of representation of large-scale topology.
title Cover Learning for Large-Scale Topology Representation
topic Machine Learning
Computational Geometry
Algebraic Topology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09767