Testing Homological Equivalence Using Betti Numbers

Abstract

In this article, we propose a one-sample test to check whether the support of the unknown distribution generating the data is homologically equivalent to the support of some specified distribution or not OR using the corresponding two-sample test, one can test whether the supports of two unknown distributions are homologically equivalent or not. In the course of this study, test statistics based on the Betti numbers are formulated, and the consistency of the tests is established under the critical and the supercritical regimes. Moreover, some simulation studies are conducted and results are compared with the existing methodologies such as Robinson's permutation test and test based on mean persistent landscape functions. Furthermore, the practicability of the tests is shown on two well-known real data sets also.