Intrinsic Bottleneck Distance for Merge Trees

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Beers, David, Grindstaff, Gillian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Beers, David
Grindstaff, Gillian
author_facet Beers, David
Grindstaff, Gillian
contents Merge trees are a topological descriptor of a filtered space that enriches the degree zero barcode with its merge structure. The space of merge trees comes equipped with an interleaving distance $d_I$, which prompts a naive question: is the interleaving distance between two merge trees equal to the bottleneck distance between their corresponding barcodes? As the map from merge trees to barcodes is not injective, the answer as posed is no, but (as conjectured in Gasparovic et al.) we prove that it is true for the \emph{intrinsic} metrics $\widehat{d}_I$ and $\widehat{d}_B$ realized by infinitesimal path length in merge tree space. This result suggests that in some special cases the bottleneck distance (which can be computed quickly) can be substituted for the interleaving distance (in general, NP-hard).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02755
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Intrinsic Bottleneck Distance for Merge Trees
Beers, David
Grindstaff, Gillian
Algebraic Topology
Metric Geometry
55M99 (primary) 51F99 (Secondary)
Merge trees are a topological descriptor of a filtered space that enriches the degree zero barcode with its merge structure. The space of merge trees comes equipped with an interleaving distance $d_I$, which prompts a naive question: is the interleaving distance between two merge trees equal to the bottleneck distance between their corresponding barcodes? As the map from merge trees to barcodes is not injective, the answer as posed is no, but (as conjectured in Gasparovic et al.) we prove that it is true for the \emph{intrinsic} metrics $\widehat{d}_I$ and $\widehat{d}_B$ realized by infinitesimal path length in merge tree space. This result suggests that in some special cases the bottleneck distance (which can be computed quickly) can be substituted for the interleaving distance (in general, NP-hard).
title Intrinsic Bottleneck Distance for Merge Trees
topic Algebraic Topology
Metric Geometry
55M99 (primary) 51F99 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02755