Reeb complexes and topological persistence

Abstract

We introduce Reeb complexes in order to capture how generators of homology flow along sections of a real valued continuous function. This intuition suggests a close relation of Reeb complexes to established methods in topological data analysis such as levelset zigzags and persistent homology. We make this relation precise and in particular explain how Reeb complexes and levelset zigzags can be extracted from the first pages of respective spectral sequences with the same termination.