Searching for Topological Symmetry in Data Haystack

Abstract: Finding interesting symmetrical topological structures in high-dimensional systems is an important problem in statistical machine learning. Limited amount of available high-dimensional data and its sensitivity to noise pose computational challenges to find symmetry. Our paper presents a new method to find local symmetries in a low-dimensional 2-D grid structure which is embedded in high-dimensional structure. To compute the symmetry in a grid structure, we introduce three legal grid moves (i) Commutation (ii) Cyclic Permutation (iii) Stabilization on sets of local grid squares, grid blocks. The three grid moves are legal transformations as they preserve the statistical distribution of hamming distances in each grid block. We propose and coin the term of grid symmetry of data on the 2-D data grid as the invariance of statistical distributions of hamming distance are preserved after a sequence of grid moves. We have computed and analyzed the grid symmetry of data on multivariate Gaussian distributions and Gamma distributions with noise.