Discrete signature tensors for persistence landscapes

Abstract

Signature tensors of paths are a versatile tool for mathematical data analysis. Recently, they have been applied in the context of vectorisation of persistent homology: after a choice of embedding of barcodes into a space of paths on a vector space, one applies the path signature map, resulting in tensors amenable to statistical and machine-learning methods. Among the different path embeddings, the persistence landscape embedding (PLE) is injective and stable, but PLE is composed with the signature map loses injectivity. Therefore, we address this by proposing a discrete alternative. Persistence landscapes are determined by the time-series of their critical points, of which we compute the discrete signature. We call this composition the {\em discrete landscape feature map} (DLFM), and give results on its injectivity, stability and computability. When studying the injectivity, we complete the proof of a general result due to Diehl, Ebrahimi-Fard and Tapia in the higher-dimensional setting. We showcase the DLFM on a knotted protein dataset, capturing sequence similarity and knot depth with statistical significance. We include an appendix with a preliminary study of Chen signatures of persistence landscapes from the point of view of algebraic geometry.