Topological Distances between Networks and Its Application to Brain Imaging

Abstract

This paper surveys various distance measures for networks and graphs that were introduced in persistent homology. The scope of the paper is limited to network distances that were actually used in brain networks but the methods can be easily adapted to any weighted graph in other fields. The network version of Gromov-Hausdorff, bottleneck, kernel distances are introduced. We also introduce a recently developed KS-test like distance based on monotonic topology features such as the zeroth Betti number. Numerous toy examples and the result of applying many different distances to the brain networks of different clinical status and populations are given.