Continuous Edit Distance, Geodesics and Barycenters of Time-varying Persistence Diagrams

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tchitchek, Sebastien, Kissi, Mohamed, Tierny, Julien
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914201657671680
author Tchitchek, Sebastien
Kissi, Mohamed
Tierny, Julien
author_facet Tchitchek, Sebastien
Kissi, Mohamed
Tierny, Julien
contents We introduce the Continuous Edit Distance (CED), a geodesic and elastic distance for time-varying persistence diagrams (TVPDs). The CED extends edit-distance ideas to TVPDs by combining local substitution costs with penalized deletions/insertions, controlled by two parameters: \(α\) (trade-off between temporal misalignment and diagram discrepancy) and \(β\) (gap penalty). We also provide an explicit construction of CED-geodesics. Building on these ingredients, we present two practical barycenter solvers, one stochastic and one greedy, that monotonically decrease the CED Frechet energy. Empirically, the CED is robust to additive perturbations (both temporal and spatial), recovers temporal shifts, and supports temporal pattern search. On real-life datasets, the CED achieves clustering performance comparable or better than standard elastic dissimilarities, while our clustering based on CED-barycenters yields superior classification results. Overall, the CED equips TVPD analysis with a principled distance, interpretable geodesics, and practical barycenters, enabling alignment, comparison, averaging, and clustering directly in the space of TVPDs. A C++ implementation is provided for reproducibility at the following address https://github.com/sebastien-tchitchek/ContinuousEditDistance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_12939
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continuous Edit Distance, Geodesics and Barycenters of Time-varying Persistence Diagrams
Tchitchek, Sebastien
Kissi, Mohamed
Tierny, Julien
Computational Geometry
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
Machine Learning
We introduce the Continuous Edit Distance (CED), a geodesic and elastic distance for time-varying persistence diagrams (TVPDs). The CED extends edit-distance ideas to TVPDs by combining local substitution costs with penalized deletions/insertions, controlled by two parameters: \(α\) (trade-off between temporal misalignment and diagram discrepancy) and \(β\) (gap penalty). We also provide an explicit construction of CED-geodesics. Building on these ingredients, we present two practical barycenter solvers, one stochastic and one greedy, that monotonically decrease the CED Frechet energy. Empirically, the CED is robust to additive perturbations (both temporal and spatial), recovers temporal shifts, and supports temporal pattern search. On real-life datasets, the CED achieves clustering performance comparable or better than standard elastic dissimilarities, while our clustering based on CED-barycenters yields superior classification results. Overall, the CED equips TVPD analysis with a principled distance, interpretable geodesics, and practical barycenters, enabling alignment, comparison, averaging, and clustering directly in the space of TVPDs. A C++ implementation is provided for reproducibility at the following address https://github.com/sebastien-tchitchek/ContinuousEditDistance.
title Continuous Edit Distance, Geodesics and Barycenters of Time-varying Persistence Diagrams
topic Computational Geometry
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Graphics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12939