Vietoris-Rips Persistent Homology, Injective Metric Spaces, and The Filling Radius Sunhyuk Lim1, Facundo Memoli´ 2, and Osman Berat Okutan3 1Department of Mathematics, The Ohio State University,
[email protected] 2Department of Mathematics and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University,
[email protected] 3Department of Mathematics, Florida State University,
[email protected] September 15, 2020 Abstract In the applied algebraic topology community, the persistent homology induced by the Vietoris-Rips simplicial filtration is a standard method for capturing topological information from metric spaces. In this paper, we consider a different, more geometric way of generating persistent homology of metric spaces which arises by first embedding a given metric space into a larger space and then considering thickenings of the original space inside this ambient metric space. In the course of doing this, we construct an appropriate category for studying this notion of persistent homology and show that, in a category theoretic sense, the standard persistent homology of the Vietoris-Rips filtration is isomorphic to our geometric persistent homology provided that the ambient metric space satisfies a property called injectivity. As an application of this isomorphism result we are able to precisely characterize the type of intervals that appear in the persistence barcodes of the Vietoris-Rips filtration of any com- pact metric space and also to give succinct proofs of the characterization of the persistent homology of products and metric gluings of metric spaces. Our results also permit proving arXiv:2001.07588v2 [math.AT] 14 Sep 2020 several bounds on the length of intervals in the Vietoris-Rips barcode by other metric invari- ants.