Strong Equivalence of the Interleaving and Functional Distortion Metrics for Reeb Graphs

Abstract: The Reeb graph is a construction that studies a topological space through the lens of a real valued function. It has widely been used in applications, however its use on real data means that it is desirable and increasingly necessary to have methods for comparison of Reeb graphs. Recently, several methods to define metrics on the space of Reeb graphs have been presented. In this paper, we focus on two: the functional distortion distance and the interleaving distance. The former is based on the Gromov--Hausdorff distance, while the latter utilizes the equivalence between Reeb graphs and a particular class of cosheaves. However, both are defined by constructing a near-isomorphism between the two graphs of study. In this paper, we show that the two metrics are strongly equivalent on the space of Reeb graphs. In particular, this gives an immediate proof of bottleneck stability for persistence diagrams in terms of the Reeb graph interleaving distance.