Persistent cycles, especially the minimal ones, are useful geometric features functioning as augmentations for the intervals in the purely topological persistence diagrams (also termed as barcodes). In our earlier work, we showed that computing minimal 1-dimensional persistent cycles (persistent 1-cycles) for finite intervals is NP-hard while the same for infinite intervals is polynomially tractable. In this paper, we address this problem for general dimensions with @math coefficients. In addition to proving that it is NP-hard to compute minimal persistent d-cycles (d>1) for both types of intervals given arbitrary simplicial complexes, we identify two interesting cases which are polynomially tractable. These two cases assume the complex to be a certain generalization of manifolds which we term as weak pseudomanifolds. For finite intervals from the d-th persistence diagram of a weak (d+1)-pseudomanifold, we utilize the fact that persistent cycles of such intervals are null-homologous and reduce the problem to a minimal cut problem. Since the same problem for infinite intervals is NP-hard, we further assume the weak (d+1)-pseudomanifold to be embedded in @math so that the complex has a natural dual graph structure and the problem reduces to a minimal cut problem. Experiments with both algorithms on scientific data indicate that the minimal persistent cycles capture various significant features of the data.
In terms of computing minimal cycles for homology groups, two problems are of most interest: the localization problem and the minimal basis problem. The localization problem asks for computing a minimal cycle in a homology class and the minimal basis problem asks for computing a set of generating cycles for a homology group whose sum of weights is minimal. With @math coefficients, these two problems are in general hard. Specifically, Chambers et al. @cite_11 proved that the localization problem over dimension one is NP-hard when the given simplicial complex is a 2-manifold. Chen and Freedman @cite_17 proved that the localization problem is NP-hard to approximate with fixed ratio over arbitrary dimension. They also showed that the minimal basis problem is NP-hard to approximate with fixed ratio over dimension greater than one. For one-dimensional homology, Dey et al. @cite_8 proposed a polynomial time algorithm for the minimal basis problem. Several other works @cite_10 @cite_23 @cite_22 address variants of the two problems while considering special input classes, alternative cycle measures, or coefficients for homology other than @math .
@cite_11 @cite_22 @cite_8 @cite_23 @cite_10 @cite_17
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We address the problem of localizing homology classes, namely, finding the cycle representing a given class with the most concise geometric measure. We focus on the volume measure, that is, the 1-norm of a cycle. Two main results are presented. First, we prove the problem is NP-hard to approximate within any constant factor. Second, we prove that for homology of dimension two or higher, the problem is NP-hard to approximate even when the Betti number is O(1). A side effect is the inapproximability of the problem of computing the nonbounding cycle with the smallest volume, and computing cycles representing a homology basis with the minimal total volume. We also discuss other geometric measures (diameter and radius) and show their disadvantages in homology localization. Our work is restricted to homology over the Z2 field. Given a simplicial complex with weights on its simplices, and a nontrivial cycle on it, we are interested in finding the cycle with minimal weight which is homologous to the given one. Assuming that the homology is defined with integer ( @math ) coefficients, we show the following (Theorem 5.2): For a finite simplicial complex @math of dimension greater than @math , the boundary matrix @math is totally unimodular if and only if @math is torsion-free for all pure subcomplexes @math in @math of dimensions @math and @math , respectively, where @math . Because of the total unimodularity of the boundary matrix, we can solve the optimization problem, which is inherently an integer programming problem, as a linear program and obtain an integer solution. Thus, the problem of finding optimal cycles in a given homology class can be solved in polynomial time. This result is surprising in the backdrop of a recent result which says that the problem is NP-hard under @math coefficients which, being a field, is in general easier to deal with. Our result implies, among other things, that one can compute in polynomial time an optimal @math -cycle in a given homology class for any triangulation of an orientable compact @math -manifold or for any finite simplicial complex embedded in @math . Our optimization approach can also be used for various related problems, such as finding an optimal chain homologous to a given one when these are not cycles. Our result can also be viewed as providing a topological characterization of total unimodularity. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), i.e. V ap WH where both V, W and H are non-negative has become a widely used blind source separation technique due to its part based representation. The NMF decomposition is not in general unique and a part based representation not guaranteed. However, imposing sparseness both improves the uniqueness of the decomposition and favors part based representation. Sparseness in the form of attaining as many zero elements in the solution as possible is appealing from a conceptional point of view and corresponds to minimizing reconstruction error with an L0 norm constraint. In general, solving for a given L0 norm is an NP hard problem thus convex relaxation to regularization by the L1 norm is often considered, i.e., minimizing (1 2||V - WH||F 2 + lambda||H||1).An open problem is to control the degree of sparsity lambda imposed. We here demonstrate that a full regularization path for the L1 norm regularized least squares NMF for fixed W can be calculated at the cost of an ordinary least squares solution based on a modification of the least angle regression and selection (LARS) algorithm forming a non-negativity constrained LARS (NLARS). With the full regularization path, the L1 regularization strength lambda that best approximates a given L0 can be directly accessed and in effect used to control the sparsity of H. The MATLAB code for the NLARS algorithm is available for download. We consider solving the @math -regularized least-squares ( @math -LS) problem in the context of sparse recovery for applications such as compressed sensing. The standard proximal gradient method, also known as iterative soft-thresholding when applied to this problem, has low computational cost per iteration but a rather slow convergence rate. Nevertheless, when the solution is sparse, it often exhibits fast linear convergence in the final stage. We exploit the local linear convergence using a homotopy continuation strategy, i.e., we solve the @math -LS problem for a sequence of decreasing values of the regularization parameter, and use an approximate solution at the end of each stage to warm start the next stage. Although similar strategies have been studied in the literature, there have been no theoretical analysis of their global iteration complexity. This paper shows that under suitable assumptions for sparse recovery, the proposed homotopy strategy ensures that all iterates along the homotopy sol...