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Recovering hidden graph-like structures from potentially noisy data is a fundamental task in modern data analysis. Recently, a persistence-guided discrete Morse-based framework to extract a geometric graph from low-dimensional data has become popular. However, to date, there is very limited theoretical understanding of this framework in terms of graph reconstruction. This paper makes a first step towards closing this gap. Specifically, first, leveraging existing theoretical understanding of persistence-guided discrete Morse cancellation, we provide a simplified version of the existing discrete Morse-based graph reconstruction algorithm. We then introduce a simple and natural noise model and show that the aforementioned framework can correctly reconstruct a graph under this noise model, in the sense that it has the same loop structure as the hidden ground-truth graph, and is also geometrically close. We also provide some experimental results for our simplified graph-reconstruction algorithm.
@InProceedings{dey_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2018.31,
author = {Dey, Tamal K. and Wang, Jiayuan and Wang, Yusu},
title = {{Graph Reconstruction by Discrete Morse Theory}},
booktitle = {34th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2018)},
pages = {31:1--31:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-066-8},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {99},
editor = {Speckmann, Bettina and T\'{o}th, Csaba D.},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2018.31},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-87443},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2018.31},
annote = {Keywords: graph reconstruction, discrete Morse theory, persistence}
}