Parameter-free topology inference and sparsification for data on manifolds

In topology inference from data, current approaches face two major problems. One concerns the selection of a correct parameter to build an appropriate complex on top of the data points; the other involves with the typical 'large' size of this complex. We address these two issues in the context of inferring homology from sample points of a smooth manifold of known dimension sitting in an Euclidean space ℝ^k. We show that, for a sample size of n points, we can identify a set of O(n²) points (as opposed to O(n^⌈k/2⌉) Voronoi vertices) approximating a subset of the medial axis that suffices to compute a distance sandwiched between the well known local feature size and the local weak feature size (in fact, the approximating set can be further reduced in size to O(n)). This distance, called the lean feature size, helps pruning the input set at least to the level of local feature size while making the data locally uniform. The local uniformity in turn helps in building a complex for homology inference on top of the sparsified data without requiring any user-supplied distance threshold. Unlike most topology inference results, ours does not require that the input is dense relative to a global feature such as reach or weak feature size; instead it can be adaptive with respect to the local feature size. We present some empirical evidence in support of our theoretical claims.