Tropical Sufficient Statistics for Persistent Homology

We show that an embedding in Euclidean space based on tropical geometry generates stable sufficient statistics for barcodes. In topological data analysis, barcodes are multiscale summaries of algebraic topological characteristics that capture the “shape” of data; however, in practice, they have complex structures that make them difficult to use in statistical settings. The sufficiency result presented in this work allows for classical probability distributions to be assumed on the tropical geometric representation of barcodes. This makes a variety of parametric statistical inference methods accessible to barcodes, all while maintaining their initial interpretations. More specifically, we show that exponential family distributions may be assumed and that likelihood functions for persistent homology may be constructed. We conceptually demonstrate sufficiency and illustrate its utility in persistent homology dimensions 0 and 1 with concrete parametric applications to human immunodeficiency virus and avian influenza data.