Papers › Deep Learning with Topological Signatures

Deep Learning with Topological Signatures

13 Jul 2017NeurIPS 2017 12arXiv:1707.04041archive 2025-07-28

Christoph Hofer, Roland Kwitt, Marc Niethammer, Andreas Uhl

Inferring topological and geometrical information from data can offer an alternative perspective on machine learning problems. Methods from topological data analysis, e.g., persistent homology, enable us to obtain such information, typically in the form of summary representations of topological features. However, such topological signatures often come with an unusual structure (e.g., multisets of intervals) that is highly impractical for most machine learning techniques. While many strategies have been proposed to map these topological signatures into machine learning compatible representations, they suffer from being agnostic to the target learning task. In contrast, we propose a technique that enables us to input topological signatures to deep neural networks and learn a task-optimal representation during training. Our approach is realized as a novel input layer with favorable theoretical properties. Classification experiments on 2D object shapes and social network graphs demonstrate the versatility of the approach and, in case of the latter, we even outperform the state-of-the-art by a large margin.

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c-hofer/persistent_homology_toolbox officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report
c-hofer/nips2017 officialmentioned in paperpytorch report
billy-mosse/spiderman mentioned on GitHub report
ssmele/CompTopoProg mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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BIG-bench Machine LearningDeep LearningTopological Data Analysis

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