Research

Joint work With Vidit Nanda.

Abstract

The Conley index of an isolated invariant set is a fundamental object in the study of dynamical systems. Here we consider smooth functions on closed submanifolds of Euclidean space and describe a framework for inferring the Conley index of any compact, connected isolated critical set of such a function with high confidence from a sufficiently large finite point sample. The main construction of this paper is a specific index pair which is local to the critical set in question. We establish that these index pairs have positive reach and hence admit a sampling theory for robust homology inference. This allows us to estimate the Conley index, and as a direct consequence, we are also able to estimate the Morse index of any critical point of a Morse function using finitely many local evaluations.

Under submission. ArXiv pre-print

Joint work With Jacob Leygonie. Published in Frontiers of Applied Mathematics and Statistics.

Abstract

A graph's spectral wavelet signature determines a filtration, and consequently an associated set of extended persistence diagrams. We propose a framework that optimizes the choice of wavelet for a dataset of graphs, such that their associated persistence diagrams capture features of the graphs that are best suited to a given data science problem. Since the spectral wavelet signature of a graph is derived from its Laplacian, our framework encodes geometric properties of graphs in their associated persistence diagrams and can be applied to graphs without a priori node attributes. We apply our framework to graph classification problems and obtain performances competitive with other persistence-based architectures. To provide the underlying theoretical foundations, we extend the differentiability result for ordinary persistent homology to extended persistent homology.

Journal (Open access) article and ArXiv pre-print

My masters (MMathPhys) dissertation on evolvability and robustness of sloppy systems in systems biology.

Click here for the pdf of my dissertation.