An Introduction to Topological Data Analysis: Fundamental and Practical Aspects for Data Scientists

Abstract

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With the recent explosion in the amount, the variety, and the dimensionality of available data, identifying, extracting, and exploiting their underlying structure has become a problem of fundamental importance for data analysis and statistical learning. Topological data analysis (tda) is a recent and fast-growing field providing a set of new topological and geometric tools to infer relevant features for possibly complex data. It proposes new well-founded mathematical theories and computational tools that can be used independently or in combination with other data analysis and statistical learning techniques. This article is a brief introduction, through a few selected topics, to basic fundamental and practical aspects of tda for nonexperts.

Keywords

• topological data analysis
• machine learning
• geometric inference
• topological inference
• statistic