Finding the Homology of Submanifolds with High Confidence from Random Samples

  • Authors:
  • Partha Niyogi;Stephen Smale;Shmuel Weinberger

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Chicago, Departments of Computer Science and Statistics, 60637, Chicago, IL, USA;Toyota Technological Institute, University Press Building, 60637, Chicago, IL, USA;University of Chicago, Department of Mathematics, University Press Building, 60637, Chicago, IL, USA

  • Venue:
  • Discrete & Computational Geometry
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Recently there has been a lot of interest in geometrically motivated approaches to data analysis in high-dimensional spaces. We consider the case where data are drawn from sampling a probability distribution that has support on or near a submanifold of Euclidean space. We show how to “learn” the homology of the submanifold with high confidence. We discuss an algorithm to do this and provide learning-theoretic complexity bounds. Our bounds are obtained in terms of a condition number that limits the curvature and nearness to self-intersection of the submanifold. We are also able to treat the situation where the data are “noisy” and lie near rather than on the submanifold in question.