A persistence lens is a hierarchy of disjoint upper and lower level sets of a continuous luminance image's Reeb graph. The boundary components of a persistence lens's interior components are Jordan curves that serve as a hierarchical segmentation of the image, and may be rendered as vector graphics. A persistence lens determines a varilet basis for the luminance image, in which image simplification is a realized by subspace projection. Image scale space, and image fractal analysis, result from applying a scale measure to each basis function.
Varilet analysis is complementary to these methods, utilizing a different measurement and counting domain for power law estimation (section ): For any choice of persistence lens, together with any choice of scale measure, the count of varilets by scale is input to Clauset's maximum likelihood estimator for power law exponent @cite_48 (figure ). Again, this approach is simpler and more direct than many, and may therefore be useful.
@cite_48
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Power-law distributions occur in many situations of scientific interest and have significant consequences for our understanding of natural and man-made phenomena. Unfortunately, the detection and characterization of power laws is complicated by the large fluctuations that occur in the tail of the distribution—the part of the distribution representing large but rare events—and by the difficulty of identifying the range over which power-law behavior holds. Commonly used methods for analyzing power-law data, such as least-squares fitting, can produce substantially inaccurate estimates of parameters for power-law distributions, and even in cases where such methods return accurate answers they are still unsatisfactory because they give no indication of whether the data obey a power law at all. Here we present a principled statistical framework for discerning and quantifying power-law behavior in empirical data. Our approach combines maximum-likelihood fitting methods with goodness-of-fit tests based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistic and likelihood ratios. We evaluate the effectiveness of the approach with tests on synthetic data and give critical comparisons to previous approaches. We also apply the proposed methods to twenty-four real-world data sets from a range of different disciplines, each of which has been conjectured to follow a power-law distribution. In some cases we find these conjectures to be consistent with the data, while in others the power law is ruled out.