Relative Interlevel Set Cohomology Categorifies Extended Persistence Diagrams

Abstract: The extended persistence diagram introduced by Cohen-Steiner, Edelsbrunner, and Harer is an invariant of real-valued continuous functions, which are $\mathbb{F}$-tame in the sense that all open interlevel sets have degree-wise finite-dimensional cohomology with coefficients in a fixed field $\mathbb{F}$. We show that relative interlevel set cohomology (RISC), which is based on the Mayer--Vietoris pyramid by Carlsson, de Silva, and Morozov, categorifies this invariant. More specifically, we define an abelian Frobenius category $\mathrm{pres}(\mathcal{J})$ of presheaves, which are presentable in a certain sense, such that the RISC $h(f)$ of an $\mathbb{F}$-tame function $f \colon X \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is an object of $\mathrm{pres}(\mathcal{J})$, and moreover the extended persistence diagram of $f$ uniquely determines - and is determined by - the corresponding element $[h(f)] \in K_0 (\mathrm{pres}(\mathcal{J}))$ in the Grothendieck group $K_0 (\mathrm{pres}(\mathcal{J}))$ of the abelian category $\mathrm{pres}(\mathcal{J})$. As an intermediate step we show that $\mathrm{pres}(\mathcal{J})$ is the abelianization of the (localized) category of complexes of $\mathbb{F}$-linear sheaves on $\mathbb{R}$, which are tame in the sense that sheaf cohomology of any open interval is finite-dimensional in each degree. This yields a close link between derived level set persistence by Curry, Kashiwara, and Schapira and the categorification of extended persistence diagrams.