EmT: Locating empty territories of homology group generators in a dataset

Persistent homology is a tool within topological data analysis to detect different dimensional holes in a dataset. The boundaries of the empty territories (i.e., holes) are not well-defined and each has multiple representations. The proposed method, Empty Territory (EmT), provides representations of different dimensional holes with a specified level of complexity of the territory boundary. EmT is designed for the setting where persistent homology uses a Vietoris-Rips complex filtration, and works as a post-analysis to refine the hole representation of the persistent homology algorithm. In particular, EmT uses alpha shapes to obtain a special class of representations that captures the empty territories with a complexity determined by the size of the alpha balls. With a fixed complexity, EmT returns the representation that contains the most points within the special class of representations. This method is limited to finding 1D holes in 2D data and 2D holes in 3D data, and is illustrated on simulation datasets of a homogeneous Poisson point process in 2D and a uniform sampling in 3D. Furthermore, the method is applied to a 2D cell tower location geography dataset and 3D Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) galaxy dataset, where it works well in capturing the empty territories.