persistent homology
Topology-aware Graph Diffusion Model with Persistent Homology
Generating realistic graphs faces challenges in estimating accurate distribution of graphs in an embedding space while preserving structural characteristics. However, existing graph generation methods primarily focus on approximating the joint distribution of nodes and edges, often overlooking topological properties such as connected components and loops, hindering accurate representation of global structures. To address this issue, we propose a Topology-Aware diffusion-based Graph Generation (TAGG), which aims to sample synthetic graphs that closely resemble the structural characteristics of the original graph based on persistent homology. Specifically, we suggest two core components: 1) Persistence Diagram Matching (PDM) loss which ensures high topological fidelity of generated graphs, and 2) Topology-aware Attention Module (TAM) which induces the denoising network to capture the homological characteristics of the original graphs. Extensive experiments on conventional graph benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach indicating high generation performance across various metrics, while achieving closer alignment with the distribution of topological features observed in the original graphs.
Learning Topological Representations for Molecular Dynamics
Geng, Dominik, Graf, Florian, Uray, Martin, Kwitt, Roland
Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations generate trajectories in a high-dimensional configuration space whose analysis critically depends on molecular descriptors, typically handcrafted observables or learned kinetic embeddings. Designing descriptors that are both expressive and broadly applicable, however, remains challenging. We study persistent homology (PH) as a general-purpose representation for MD and introduce the masked Flood complex, a protein-tailored modification of a recently introduced simplicial complex construction that emphasizes inter-residue structure at low computational cost. Vectorized persistence diagrams then provide information-rich, geometry-aware summaries of protein conformations, which we evaluate on protein class prediction, frame-level observable regression, and Markov state model (MSM) estimation from learned low-dimensional coordinates in a single shared representation space. Results on the mdCATH dataset show that PH-based descriptors are competitive across tasks, with masked Flood PH yielding the most consistent overall performance. Further, when using topologically-informed MSMs as a drop-in replacement within the recent MarS-FM framework for generative modeling of protein conformations, we obtain consistently better ensemble statistics than MSMs based on physical observables. Finally, we explore the transferability of the generative model to qualitatively different, fast folding, proteins.
PHINN: Persistent Homology Inspired Neural Network for Rare-Event Time Series Generation
Yusuf, Emre, Takahashi, Ren, Bhaduri, Jayabrata
Rare events in time series are critical to model but hard to learn due to data scarcity. Current generative models struggle with extreme values. We observe that rare events leave distinct topological fingerprints - transitions in Betti numbers from point-cloud embeddings - that are more stable and discriminative than statistical moments. We introduce PHINN, a flow-matching framework using dynamic Betti curves as conditioning signals and a persistence landscape loss for homology consistency. It scales to multivariate data, includes a natural-language interface to set Betti targets, supports cross-domain meta-learning and few-shot generation, and provides certified adversarial robustness. On financial, epidemiological, and multi-modal benchmarks, PHINN outperforms statistical and diffusion baselines in topological fidelity (beta-RMSE down 41-63%, transition accuracy up 84%) and matches jump-diffusion models in tail coverage while exceeding them in shape fidelity. All results have 95% confidence intervals.
From Persistence to Survival: Hypothesis Testing, Effect Sizes and Vectorisation for Topological Features
Murris, Juliette, Stolz, Bernadette, Borgwardt, Karsten
Persistence diagrams are common representations in topological data analysis, but they do not naturally live in a vector space, and the statistical tools developed for comparing them have largely evolved separately from those used for downstream prediction. We introduce STRAND (Survival Topological Representation ANalysis of Diagrams), which treats (collections of) PDs as survival data: each topological feature with persistence value $p = d - b$ is a fully observed time-to-event, and the persistence survival function $S(t) = \mathbb{P}(p > t)$ is the central object for comparing diagrams. From this single representation we derive (i) a non-parametric two-sample test with calibrated Type I error and high power from a small number of diagrams; (ii) interpretable effect sizes; and (iii) a 1-Wasserstein-stable feature vector for downstream machine learning. We validate calibration and power on synthetic manifolds with controlled topology, demonstrate competitive vectorisation across 14 graph and 3D point cloud benchmarks, and apply the method to study functional brain connectivity in fMRI/neuroscience data. To our knowledge, STRAND is the first method to provide hypothesis testing and vectorisation for persistence diagrams from a single coherent and interpretable representation.
Topological Signatures of Grokking
Tang, Yifan, Wang, Qiquan, García-Redondo, Inés, Monod, Anthea
We study the grokking phenomenon through the lens of topology. Using persistent homology on point clouds derived from the embedding matrices of a range of models trained on modular arithmetic with varying primes, we identify a clear and consistent topological signature of grokking: a sharp increase in both the maximum and total persistence of first homology ($H_1$). Persistence diagrams reveal the emergence of a dominant long-lived topological feature together with increasingly structured secondary features, reflecting the underlying cyclic structure of the task. Compared to existing spectral and geometric diagnostics -- specifically, Fourier analysis and local intrinsic dimension -- persistent homology provides a unified geometric and topological characterization of representation learning, capturing both local and global multi-scale structure. Ablations across data regimes and control settings show that these topological transitions are tied to generalization rather than memorization. Our results suggest that persistent homology offers a principled and interpretable framework for analyzing how neural networks internalize latent structure during training.
Persistent Homology of Time Series through Complex Networks
We present a unified pipeline for univariate time series classification via complex networks and persistent homology. A time series is mapped to a graph through one of five constructions across three families--visibility (natural and horizontal visibility graphs), transition, and proximity--and the graph is converted to a dissimilarity matrix from which a Vietoris-Rips filtration yields persistence diagrams. These diagrams are vectorized into fixed-length features through persistence landscapes and topological summary statistics. By standardizing the downstream processing, differences in classification performance are attributable to the network construction and distance metric alone. Experiments on twelve UCR benchmarks show that (i) no single construction dominates: the optimal graph type depends on the signal's discriminative structure; (ii) the graph distance metric is a first-order design choice, with diffusion distance uniformly outperforming shortest-path alternatives; and (iii) persistence-based features degrade gracefully under noise, consistent with the classical stability theorem of persistent homology.
Adaptive Topological Feature via Persistent Homology: Filtration Learning for Point Clouds
Machine learning for point clouds has been attracting much attention, with many applications in various fields, such as shape recognition and material science. For enhancing the accuracy of such machine learning methods, it is often effective to incorporate global topological features, which are typically extracted by persistent homology. In the calculation of persistent homology for a point cloud, we choose a filtration for the point cloud, an increasing sequence of spaces. Since the performance of machine learning methods combined with persistent homology is highly affected by the choice of a filtration, we need to tune it depending on data and tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework that learns a filtration adaptively with the use of neural networks. In order to make the resulting persistent homology isometry-invariant, we develop a neural network architecture with such invariance. Additionally, we show a theoretical result on a finite-dimensional approximation of filtration functions, which justifies the proposed network architecture. Experimental results demonstrated the efficacy of our framework in several classification tasks.