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Main Authors: Huber, Marius, Reich, David R., Jäger, Lena A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21698
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author Huber, Marius
Reich, David R.
Jäger, Lena A.
author_facet Huber, Marius
Reich, David R.
Jäger, Lena A.
contents Persistent homology, a method from topological data analysis, extracts robust, multi-scale features from data. It produces stable representations of time series by applying varying thresholds to their values (a process known as a \textit{filtration}). We develop novel filtrations for time series and introduce topological methods for the analysis of eye-tracking data, by interpreting fixation sequences as time series, and constructing ``hybrid models'' that combine topological features with traditional statistical features. We empirically evaluate our method by applying it to the task of dyslexia detection from eye-tracking-while-reading data using the Copenhagen Corpus, which contains scanpaths from dyslexic and non-dyslexic L1 and L2 readers. Our hybrid models outperform existing approaches that rely solely on traditional features, showing that persistent homology captures complementary information encoded in fixation sequences. The strength of these topological features is further underscored by their achieving performance comparable to established baseline methods. Importantly, our proposed filtrations outperform existing ones.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_21698
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fixation Sequences as Time Series: A Topological Approach to Dyslexia Detection
Huber, Marius
Reich, David R.
Jäger, Lena A.
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Algebraic Topology
Persistent homology, a method from topological data analysis, extracts robust, multi-scale features from data. It produces stable representations of time series by applying varying thresholds to their values (a process known as a \textit{filtration}). We develop novel filtrations for time series and introduce topological methods for the analysis of eye-tracking data, by interpreting fixation sequences as time series, and constructing ``hybrid models'' that combine topological features with traditional statistical features. We empirically evaluate our method by applying it to the task of dyslexia detection from eye-tracking-while-reading data using the Copenhagen Corpus, which contains scanpaths from dyslexic and non-dyslexic L1 and L2 readers. Our hybrid models outperform existing approaches that rely solely on traditional features, showing that persistent homology captures complementary information encoded in fixation sequences. The strength of these topological features is further underscored by their achieving performance comparable to established baseline methods. Importantly, our proposed filtrations outperform existing ones.
title Fixation Sequences as Time Series: A Topological Approach to Dyslexia Detection
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Algebraic Topology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21698