Realizations of Indecomposable Persistence Modules of Arbitrarily Large Dimension

Abstract

While persistent homology has taken strides towards becoming a wide-spread tool for data analysis, multidimensional persistence has proven more difficult to apply. One reason is the serious drawback of no longer having a concise and complete descriptor analogous to the persistence diagrams of the former. We propose a simple algebraic construction to illustrate the existence of infinite families of indecomposable persistence modules over regular grids of sufficient size. On top of providing a constructive proof of representation infinite type, we also provide realizations by topological spaces and Vietoris-Rips filtrations, showing that they can actually appear in real data and are not the product of degeneracies.