Convergence of Persistence Diagrams for Topological Crackle

Abstract

In this paper we study the persistent homology associated with topological crackle generated by distributions with an unbounded support. Persistent homology is a topological and algebraic structure that tracks the creation and destruction of homological cycles (generalizations of loops or holes) in different dimensions. Topological crackle is a term that refers to homological cycles generated by "noisy" samples where the support is unbounded. We aim to establish weak convergence results for persistence diagrams - a point process representation for persistent homology, where each homological cycle is represented by its (birth,death) coordinates. In this work we treat persistence diagrams as random closed sets, so that the resulting weak convergence is defined in terms of the Fell topology. In this framework we show that the limiting persistence diagrams can be divided into two parts. The first part is a deterministic limit containing a densely-growing number of persistence pairs with a short lifespan. The second part is a two-dimensional Poisson process, representing persistence pairs with a longer lifespan.