Monoidal Rips: Stable Multiparameter Filtrations of Directed Networks

Abstract: We introduce the monoidal Rips filtration, a filtered simplicial set for weighted directed graphs and other lattice-valued networks. Our construction generalizes the Vietoris-Rips filtration for metric spaces by replacing the maximum operator, determining the filtration values, with a more general monoidal product. We establish interleaving guarantees for the monoidal Rips persistent homology, capturing existing stability results for real-valued networks. When the lattice is a product of totally ordered sets, we are in the setting of multiparameter persistence. Here, the interleaving distance is bounded in terms of a generalized network distance. We use this to prove a novel stability result for the sublevel Rips bifiltration. Our experimental results show that our method performs better than flagser in a graph regression task, and that combining different monoidal products in point cloud classification can improve performance.