Metric graphs are meaningful objects for modeling complex structures that arise in many real-world applications, such as road networks, river systems, earthquake faults, blood vessels, and filamentary structures in galaxies. To study metric graphs in the context of comparison, we are interested in determining the relative discriminative capabilities of two topology-based distances between a pair of arbitrary finite metric graphs: the persistence distortion distance and the intrinsic Cech distance. We explicitly show how to compute the intrinsic Cech distance between two metric graphs based solely on knowledge of the shortest systems of loops for the graphs. Our main theorem establishes an inequality between the intrinsic Cech and persistence distortion distances in the case when one of the graphs is a bouquet graph and the other is arbitrary. The relationship also holds when both graphs are constructed via wedge sums of cycles and edges.
In the context of comparing the relative discriminative capabilities of these distances, Bauer, Ge, and Wang @cite_5 show that the functional distortion distance between two Reeb graphs is bounded from below by the bottleneck distance between the persistence diagrams of the Reeb graphs. Bauer, Munch, and Wang @cite_0 establish a strong equivalence between the functional distortion distance and the interleaving distance on the space of all Reeb graphs, which implies the two distances are within a constant factor of one another. Carri ere and Oudot @cite_9 consider the intrinsic versions of the aforementioned distances and prove that they are all globally equivalent. They also establish a lower bound for the bottleneck distance in terms of a constant multiple of the functional distortion distance. In @cite_6 , Dey, Shi, and Wang show that the persistence distortion distance is stable with respect to changes to input metric graphs as measured by the Gromov-Hausdorff distance. In other words, the persistence distortion distance is bounded above by a constant factor of the Gromov-Hausdorff distance. Furthermore, the intrinsic distance is also bounded from above by the Gromov-Hausdorff distance for general metric spaces @cite_18 .
@cite_18 @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_5
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We propose a metric for Reeb graphs, called the functional distortion distance. Under this distance, the Reeb graph is stable against small changes of input functions. At the same time, it remains discriminative at differentiating input functions. In particular, the main result is that the functional distortion distance between two Reeb graphs is bounded from below by the bottleneck distance between both the ordinary and extended persistence diagrams for appropriate dimensions. As an application of our results, we analyze a natural simplification scheme for Reeb graphs, and show that persistent features in Reeb graph remains persistent under simplification. Understanding the stability of important features of the Reeb graph under simplification is an interesting problem on its own right, and critical to the practical usage of Reeb graphs. The Reeb graph is a construction that studies a topological space through the lens of a real valued function. It has been commonly used in applications, however its use on real data means that it is desirable and increasingly necessary to have methods for comparison of Reeb graphs. Recently, several metrics on the set of Reeb graphs have been proposed. In this paper, we focus on two: the functional distortion distance and the interleaving distance. The former is based on the Gromov-Hausdorff distance, while the latter utilizes the equivalence between Reeb graphs and a particular class of cosheaves. However, both are defined by constructing a near-isomorphism between the two graphs of study. In this paper, we show that the two metrics are strongly equivalent on the space of Reeb graphs. Our result also implies the bottleneck stability for persistence diagrams in terms of the Reeb graph interleaving distance. One of the prevailing ideas in geometric and topological data analysis is to provide descriptors that encode useful information about hidden objects from observed data. The Reeb graph is one such descriptor for a given scalar function. The Reeb graph provides a simple yet meaningful abstraction of the input domain, and can also be computed efficiently. Given the popularity of the Reeb graph in applications, it is important to understand its stability and robustness with respect to changes in the input function, as well as to be able to compare the Reeb graphs resulting from different functions. In this paper, we propose a metric for Reeb graphs, called the functional distortion distance. Under this distance measure, the Reeb graph is stable against small changes of input functions. At the same time, it remains discriminative at differentiating input functions. In particular, the main result is that the functional distortion distance between two Reeb graphs is bounded from below by (and thus more discriminative than) the bottleneck distance between both the ordinary and extended persistence diagrams for appropriate dimensions. As an application of our results, we analyze a natural simplification scheme for Reeb graphs, and show that persistent features in Reeb graph remains persistent under simplification. Understanding the stability of important features of the Reeb graph under simplification is an interesting problem on its own right, and critical to the practical usage of Reeb graphs. Metric graphs are ubiquitous in science and engineering. For example, many data are drawn from hidden spaces that are graph-like, such as the cosmic web. A metric graph offers one of the simplest yet still meaningful ways to represent the non-linear structure hidden behind the data. In this paper, we propose a new distance between two finite metric graphs, called the persistence-distortion distance, which draws upon a topological idea. This topological perspective along with the metric space viewpoint provide a new angle to the graph matching problem. Our persistence-distortion distance has two properties not shared by previous methods: First, it is stable against the perturbations of the input graph metrics. Second, it is a continuous distance measure, in the sense that it is defined on an alignment of the underlying spaces of input graphs, instead of merely their nodes. This makes our persistence-distortion distance robust against, for example, different discretizations of the same underlying graph. Despite considering the input graphs as continuous spaces, that is, taking all points into account, we show that we can compute the persistence-distortion distance in polynomial time. The time complexity for the discrete case where only graph nodes are considered is much faster. As graphical summaries for topological spaces and maps, Reeb graphs are common objects in the computer graphics or topological data analysis literature. Defining good metrics between these objects has become an important question for applications, where it matters to quantify the extent by which two given Reeb graphs differ. Recent contributions emphasize this aspect, proposing novel distances such as functional distortion or interleaving that are provably more discriminative than the so-called bottleneck distance, being true metrics whereas the latter is only a pseudo-metric. Their main drawback compared to the bottleneck distance is to be comparatively hard (if at all possible) to evaluate. Here we take the opposite view on the problem and show that the bottleneck distance is in fact good enough locally, in the sense that it is able to discriminate a Reeb graph from any other Reeb graph in a small enough neighborhood, as efficiently as the other metrics do. This suggests considering the intrinsic metrics induced by these distances, which turn out to be all globally equivalent. This novel viewpoint on the study of Reeb graphs has a potential impact on applications, where one may not only be interested in discriminating between data but also in interpolating between them. We consider the setting of Reeb graphs of piecewise linear functions and study distances between them that are stable, meaning that functions which are similar in the supremum norm ought to have similar Reeb graphs. We define an edit distance for Reeb graphs and prove that it is stable and universal, meaning that it provides an upper bound to any other stable distance. In contrast, via a specific construction, we show that the interleaving distance and the functional distortion distance on Reeb graphs are not universal. We introduce and study the notion of the average distortion of a nonexpanding embedding of one metric space into another. Less sensitive than the multiplicative metric distortion, the average distortion captures well the global picture, and, overall, is a quite interesting new measure of metric proximity, related to the concentration of measure phenomenon. We establish close mutual relations between the MinCut- MaxFlow gap in a uniform-demand multicommodity flow, and the average distortion of embedding the suitable (dual) metric into l1. These relations are exploited to show that the shortest-path metrics of special (e.g., planar, bounded treewidth, etc.) graphs embed into l1 with constant average distortion. The main result of the paper claims that this remains true even if l1 is replaced with the line. This result is further sharpened for graphs of a bounded treewidth. A standard way of approximating or discretizing a metric space is by taking its Rips complexes. These approximations for all parameters are often bound together into a filtration, to which we apply the fundamental group or the first homology. We call the resulting object persistence. Recent results demonstrate that persistence of a compact geodesic locally contractible space X carries a lot of geometric information. However, by definition the corresponding Rips complexes have uncountably many vertices. In this paper we show that nonetheless, the whole persistence of X may be obtained by an appropriate finite sample (subset of X), and that persistence of any subset of X is well interleaved with the persistence of X. It follows that the persistence of X is the minimum of persistences obtained by all finite samples. Furthermore, we prove a much improved Stability theorem for such approximations. As a special case we provide for each (r>0 ) a density (s>0 ), so that for each s-dense sample (S X ) the corresponding fundamental group (and the first homology) of the Rips complex of S is isomorphic to the one of X, leading to an improved reconstruction result. Reeb graphs are structural descriptors that capture shape properties of a topological space from the perspective of a chosen function. In this work, we define a combinatorial distance for Reeb graphs of orientable surfaces in terms of the cost necessary to transform one graph into another by edit operations. The main contributions of this paper are the stability property and the optimality of this edit distance. More precisely, the stability result states that changes in the Reeb graphs, measured by the edit distance, are as small as changes in the functions, measured by the maximum norm. The optimality result states that the edit distance discriminates Reeb graphs better than any other distance for Reeb graphs of surfaces satisfying the stability property. We consider the problem of computing the smallest possible distortion for embedding of a given n-point metric space into ℝ d , where d is fixed (and small). For d = 1, it was known that approximating the minimum distortion with a factor better than roughly n 1 12 is NP-hard. From this result we derive inapproximability with a factor roughly n 1 (22d-10) for every fixed d ≥ 2, by a conceptually very simple reduction. However, the proof of correctness involves a nontrivial result in geometric topology (whose current proof is based on ideas due to Jussi Vaisala), For d > 3, we obtain a stronger inapproximability result by a different reduction: assuming P≠NP, no polynomial-time algorithm can distinguish between spaces embeddable in ℝ d with constant distortion from spaces requiring distortion at least n c d , for a constant c > 0. The exponent c d has the correct order of magnitude, since every n-point metric space can be embedded in ℝ d with distortion O(n 2 d log 3 2 n) and such an embedding can be constructed in polynomial time by random projection. For d = 2, we give an example of a metric space that requires a large distortion for embedding in ℝ 2 , while all not too large subspaces of it embed almost isometrically. The Hausdorff distance dH is a widely used tool to measure the distance between different objects in several research fields. Possible reasons for this might be that it is a natural extension of the well-known and intuitive distance between points and or the fact that dH defines in certain cases a metric in the mathematical sense. In evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) the task is typically to compute the entire solution set-the so-called Pareto set-respectively its image, the Pareto front. Hence, dH should, at least at first sight, be a natural choice to measure the performance of the outcome set in particular since it is related to the terms spread and convergence as used in EMO literature. However, so far, dH does not find the general approval in the EMO community. The main reason for this is that dH penalizes single outliers of the candidate set which does not comply with the use of stochastic search algorithms such as evolutionary strategies. In this paper, we define a new performance indicator, Δp, which can be viewed as an “averaged Hausdorff distance” between the outcome set and the Pareto front and which is composed of (slight modifications of) the well-known indicators generational distance (GD) and inverted generational distance (IGD). We will discuss theoretical properties of Δp (as well as for GD and IGD) such as the metric properties and the compliance with state-of-theart multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs), and will further on demonstrate by empirical results the potential of Δp as a new performance indicator for the evaluation of MOEAs. This paper addresses the basic question of how well a tree can approximate distances of a metric space or a graph. Given a graph, the problem of constructing a spanning tree in a graph which strongly preserves distances in the graph is a fundamental problem in network design. We present scaling distortion embeddings where the distortion scales as a function of @math , with the guarantee that for each @math simultaneously, the distortion of a fraction @math of all pairs is bounded accordingly. Quantitatively, we prove that any finite metric space embeds into an ultrametric with scaling distortion @math . For the graph setting, we prove that any weighted graph contains a spanning tree with scaling distortion @math . These bounds are tight even for embedding into arbitrary trees. These results imply that the average distortion of the embedding is constant and that the @math distortion is @math . For probabilistic embedding into spanning trees we prove a scaling distortion of @math , which implies constant @math -distortion for every fixed @math . Reeb graphs are structural descriptors that capture shape properties of a topological space from the perspective of a chosen function. In this work we define a combinatorial metric for Reeb graphs of orientable surfaces in terms of the cost necessary to transform one graph into another by edit operations. The main contributions of this paper are the stability property and the optimality of this edit distance. More precisely, the stability result states that changes in the functions, measured by the maximum norm, imply not greater changes in the corresponding Reeb graphs, measured by the edit distance. The optimality result states that our edit distance discriminates Reeb graphs better than any other metric for Reeb graphs of surfaces satisfying the stability property. We prove two stability results for Lipschitz functions on triangulable, compact metric spaces and consider applications of both to problems in systems biology. Given two functions, the first result is formulated in terms of the Wasserstein distance between their persistence diagrams and the second in terms of their total persistence. We dene a notion of a measured length space X having nonnegative N-Ricci curvature, for N 2 [1;1), or having1-Ricci curvature bounded below byK, forK2 R. The denitions are in terms of the displacement convexity of certain functions on the associated Wasserstein metric space P2(X) of probability measures. We show that these properties are preserved under measured Gromov-Hausdor limits. We give geometric and analytic consequences. This paper has dual goals. One goal is to extend results about optimal transport from the setting of smooth Riemannian manifolds to the setting of length spaces. A second goal is to use optimal transport to give a notion for a measured length space to have Ricci curvature bounded below. We refer to [11] and [44] for background material on length spaces and optimal transport, respectively. Further bibliographic notes on optimal transport are in Appendix F. In the present introduction we motivate the questions that we address and we state the main results. To start on the geometric side, there are various reasons to try to extend notions of curvature from smooth Riemannian manifolds to more general spaces. A fairly general setting is that of length spaces, meaning metric spaces (X;d) in which the distance between two points equals the inmum of the lengths of curves joining the points. In the rest of this introduction we assume that X is a compact length space. Alexandrov gave a good notion of a length space having bounded below by K", with K a real number, in terms of the geodesic triangles in X. In the case of a Riemannian manifold M with the induced length structure, one recovers the Riemannian notion of having sectional curvature bounded below by K. Length spaces with Alexandrov curvature bounded below by K behave nicely with respect to the GromovHausdor topology on compact metric spaces (modulo isometries); they form This paper addresses the non-linear isomorphic Dvoretzky theorem and the design of good approximate distance oracles for large distortion. We introduce and construct optimal Ramsey partitions, and use them to show that for every (0, 1), any n-point metric space has a subset of size n^ 1 - which embeds into Hilbert space with distortion O(1 ). This result is best possible and improves part of the metric Ramsey theorem of Bartal, Linial, Mendel and Naor [5], in addition to considerably simplifying its proof. We use our new Ramsey partitions to design approximate distance oracles with a universal constant query time, closing a gap left open by Thorup and Zwick in [26]. Namely, we show that for any n point metric space X, and k 1, there exists an O(k)-approximate distance oracle whose storage requirement is O(n^ 1 + 1 k ), and whose query time is a universal constant. We also discuss applications to various other geometric data structures, and the relation to well separated pair decompositions. A probabilistic C-embedding of a (guest) metric M into a collection of(host) metrics M'1, ..., M'k is a randomized mapping F of M intoone of the M'1, ..., M'k such that, for any two points p,q in theguest metric: The distance between F(p) and F(q) in any M'i is not smaller thanthe original distance between p and q. The expected distance between F(p) and F(q) in (random) M'i is notgreater than some constant C times the original distance, for C≥ 1. The constant C is called the distortion of the embedding. Low-distortion probabilistic embeddings enable reducing algorithmicproblems over "hard" guest metrics into "easy" host metrics.We show that every metric induced by a graph of bounded genus can beprobabilistically embedded into planar graphs, with constant distortion. The embedding can be computed efficiently, given a drawing of the graphon a genus-g surface. We study distorted metrics on binary trees in the context of phylogenetic reconstruction. Given a binary tree T on n leaves with a path metric d, consider the pairwise distances d(u,v) between leaves. It is well known that these determine the tree and the d length of all edges. Here, we consider distortions @math of d such that, for all leaves u and v, it holds that @math if either d(u,v)< M + f 2 or @math , where d satisfies f ≤ d(e) ≤ g for all edges e. Given such distortions, we show how to reconstruct in polynomial time a forest T1, ... ,Tα such that the true tree T may be obtained from that forest by adding α-1 edges and α-1 ≤ 2-Ω(M g) n. Our distorted metric result implies a reconstruction algorithm of phylogenetic forests with a small number of trees from sequences of length logarithmic in the number of species. The reconstruction algorithm is applicable for the general Markov model. Both the distorted metric result and its applications to phylogeny are almost tight. where de denotes normalized surface measure, V is the conformal gradient and q = (2n) (n 2). A modern folklore theorem is that by taking the infinitedimensional limit of this inequality, one obtains the Gross logarithmic Sobolev inequality for Gaussian measure, which determines Nelson's hypercontractive estimates for the Hermite semigroup (see [8]). One observes using conformal invariance that the above inequality is equivalent to the sharp Sobolev inequality on Rn for which boundedness and extremal functions can be easily calculated using dilation invariance and geometric symmetrization. The roots here go back to Hardy and Littlewood. The advantage of casting the problem on the sphere is that the role of the constants is evident, and one is led immediately to the conjecture that this inequality should hold whenever possible (for example, 2 < q < 0o if n = 2). This is in fact true and will be demonstrated in Section 2. A clear question at this point is "What is the situation in dimension 2?" Two important arguments ([25], [26], [27]) dealt with this issue, both motivated by geometric variational problems. Because q goes to infinity for dimension 2, the appropriate function space is the exponential class. Responding in part The Johnson--Lindenstrauss lemma shows that any n points in Euclidean space (i.e., ℝn with distances measured under the e 2 norm) may be mapped down to O((log n) e2) dimensions such that no pairwise distance is distorted by more than a (1 p e) factor. Determining whether such dimension reduction is possible in e 1 has been an intriguing open question. We show strong lower bounds for general dimension reduction in e 1 . We give an explicit family of n points in e 1 such that any embedding with constant distortion D requires nΩ(1 D2) dimensions. This proves that there is no analog of the Johnson--Lindenstrauss lemma for e 1 ; in fact, embedding with any constant distortion requires nΩ(1) dimensions. Further, embedding the points into e 1 with (1pe) distortion requires nh−O(e log(1 e)) dimensions. Our proof establishes this lower bound for shortest path metrics of series-parallel graphs. We make extensive use of linear programming and duality in devising our bounds. We expect that the tools and techniques we develop will be useful for future investigations of embeddings into e 1 .