Topological Deep Learning: Classification Neural Networks

Topological deep learning is a formalism that is aimed at introducing topological language to deep learning for the purpose of utilizing the minimal mathematical structures to formalize problems that arise in a generic deep learning problem. This is the first of a sequence of articles with the purpose of introducing and studying this formalism. In this article, we define and study the classification problem in machine learning in a topological setting. Using this topological framework, we show when the classification problem is possible or not possible in the context of neural networks. Finally, we show that for a given data, the architecture of a classification neural network must take into account the topology of this data in order to achieve a successful classification task.