Too Many or Too Few? Sampling Bounds for Topological Descriptors

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Hauptverfasser: Fasy, Brittany Terese, Makarchuk, Maksym, Micka, Samuel, Millman, David L.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Fasy, Brittany Terese
Makarchuk, Maksym
Micka, Samuel
Millman, David L.
author_facet Fasy, Brittany Terese
Makarchuk, Maksym
Micka, Samuel
Millman, David L.
contents Topological descriptors, such as the Euler characteristic function and the persistence diagram, have grown increasingly popular for representing complex data. Recent work showed that a carefully chosen set of these descriptors encodes all of the geometric and topological information about a shape in R^d. In practice, epsilon nets are often used to find samples in one of two extremes. On one hand, making strong geometric assumptions about the shape allows us to choose epsilon small enough (corresponding to a high enough density sample) in order to guarantee a faithful representation, resulting in oversampling. On the other hand, if we choose a larger epsilon in order to allow faster computations, this leads to an incomplete description of the shape and a discretized transform that lacks theoretical guarantees. In this work, we investigate how many directions are really needed to represent geometric simplicial complexes, exploring both synthetic and real-world datasets. We provide constructive proofs that help establish size bounds and an experimental investigation giving insights into the consequences of over- and undersampling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12059
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Too Many or Too Few? Sampling Bounds for Topological Descriptors
Fasy, Brittany Terese
Makarchuk, Maksym
Micka, Samuel
Millman, David L.
Computational Geometry
Algebraic Topology
Topological descriptors, such as the Euler characteristic function and the persistence diagram, have grown increasingly popular for representing complex data. Recent work showed that a carefully chosen set of these descriptors encodes all of the geometric and topological information about a shape in R^d. In practice, epsilon nets are often used to find samples in one of two extremes. On one hand, making strong geometric assumptions about the shape allows us to choose epsilon small enough (corresponding to a high enough density sample) in order to guarantee a faithful representation, resulting in oversampling. On the other hand, if we choose a larger epsilon in order to allow faster computations, this leads to an incomplete description of the shape and a discretized transform that lacks theoretical guarantees. In this work, we investigate how many directions are really needed to represent geometric simplicial complexes, exploring both synthetic and real-world datasets. We provide constructive proofs that help establish size bounds and an experimental investigation giving insights into the consequences of over- and undersampling.
title Too Many or Too Few? Sampling Bounds for Topological Descriptors
topic Computational Geometry
Algebraic Topology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12059