Persistent spectral graph

Abstract: Persistent homology is constrained to purely topological persistence while multiscale graphs account only for geometric information. This work introduces persistent spectral theory to create a unified low-dimensional multiscale paradigm for revealing topological persistence and extracting geometric shape from high-dimensional datasets. For a point-cloud dataset, a filtration procedure is used to generate a sequence of chain complexes and associated families of simplicial complexes and chains, from which we construct persistent combinatorial Laplacian matrices. We show that a full set of topological persistence can be completely recovered from the harmonic persistent spectra, i.e., the spectra that have zero eigenvalues, of the persistent combinatorial Laplacian matrices. However, non-harmonic spectra of the Laplacian matrices induced by the filtration offer another power tool for data analysis, modeling, and prediction. In this work, non-harmonic persistent spectra are successfully devised to analyze the structure and stability of fullerenes and predict the B-factors of a protein, which cannot be straightforwardly extracted from the current persistent homology. Extensive numerical experiments indicate the tremendous potential of the proposed persistent spectral analysis in data science.