How much of persistent homology is topology? A quantitative decomposition for spin model phase transitions

Abstract

Point-cloud persistent homology (PH) -- computing alpha or Rips complexes on spin-position point clouds -- has been widely applied to detect phase transitions in classical spin models since Donato et al. (2016), with subsequent studies attributing the detection to the topological content of the persistence diagram. We ask a simple question that has not been posed: what fraction of the PH signal is genuinely topological? We introduce f_topo, a quantitative decomposition that separates the density-driven and topological contributions to any PH statistic by comparing real spin configurations against density-matched shuffled null models. Across the 2D Ising model (system sizes L = 16-128, ten temperatures) and Potts models (q = 3, 5), we find that H_0 statistics -- total persistence, persistence entropy, feature count -- are 94-100% density-driven (f_topo < 0.07). The density-matched shuffled null detects T_c at the identical location and with comparable peak height as real configurations, showing that density alone is sufficient for phase transition detection. However, H_1 statistics are partially topological: the topological fraction grows with system size as delta(TP_{H_1}) ~ L^{0.53} and follows a finite-size scaling collapse delta(T, L) = L^{0.53} g(tL^{1/nu}) with collapse quality CV = 0.27. The longest persistence bar is strongly topological (f_topo > 1) and scales with the correlation length. A scale-resolved analysis reveals that the topological excess shifts from large-scale to small-scale features as L increases. We propose that the TDA-for-phase-transitions community adopt shuffled null models as standard practice, and that H_1 rather than H_0 statistics be used when genuine topological information is sought.