Mickaël Buchet, Frédéric Chazal, Tamal K. Dey, Fengtao Fan, Steve Y. Oudot, and Yusu Wang. Topological analysis of scalar fields with outliers. Proc. Sympos. on Computational Geometry, 2015. To appear.

Abstract:

Given a real-valued function f defined over a manifold M embedded in Rd, we are interested in recovering structural information about f from the sole information of its values on a finite sample P in M. Existing methods provide approximation to the persistence diagram of f when the noise is bounded in both the functional and geometric domains. However, they fail in the presence of aberrant values, also called outliers, both in theory and practice.
We propose a new algorithm that deals with outliers. We handle aberrant functional values with a method inspired from the k-nearest neighbors regression and the local median filtering, while the geometric outliers are handled using the distance to a measure. Combined with topological results on nested filtrations, our algorithm performs robust topological analysis of scalar fields in a wider range of noise models than handled by current methods. We provide theoretical guarantees on the quality of our approximation and some experimental results illustrating its behavior.

Bibtex: 

@inproceedings{bcdfow-tasfo-15,
 author = {M. Buchet and F. Chazal and T. K. Dey and F. Fan and S. Y. Oudot and Y. Wang},
 title = {Topological analysis of scalar fields with outliers},
 booktitle = {Proc. Sympos. on Computational Geometry},
 year = {2015}
 }