Title:Stability of 0-dimensional persistent homology in enriched and sparsified point clouds

Abstract:We give bounds for dimension 0 persistent homology and codimension 1 homology of Vietoris--Rips, alpha, and cubical complex filtrations from finite sets related by enrichment (adding new elements), sparsification (removing elements), and aligning to a grid (uniformly discretizing elements). For enrichment we use barycentric subdivision, for sparsification we use an iterative minimum separating distance procedure, and for aligning to a grid we take the quotient when dividing each coordinate value by a fixed step size. We are motivated by applications to biology, in which the state of a species is inferred through its ``hypervolume'', a high-dimensional space with environmental variables as dimensions. The hypervolume has geometry (volume, convexity) and topology (connectedness, homology), which are known to be related to the current and potentially future status of the species. We offer an approach with topological guarantees that is complementary to modern methods for computing the hypervolume, giving precise bounds between persistence diagrams of Vietoris--Rips and alpha complexes, and a duality identity for cubical complexes. Implementation of our methods, called TopoAware, is made available in C++, Python, and R, building upon the GUDHI library.