A Comparative Study of Machine Learning Methods for Persistence Diagrams

Many and varied methods currently exist for featurization, which is the process of mapping persistence diagrams to Euclidean space, with the goal of maximally preserving structure. However, and to our knowledge, there are presently no methodical comparisons of existing approaches, nor a standardized collection of test data sets. This paper provides a comparative study of several such methods. In particular, we review, evaluate, and compare the stable multi-scale kernel, persistence landscapes, persistence images, the ring of algebraic functions, template functions, and adaptive template systems. Using these approaches for feature extraction, we apply and compare popular machine learning methods on five data sets: MNIST, Shape retrieval of non-rigid 3D Human Models (SHREC14), extracts from the Protein Classification Benchmark Collection (Protein), MPEG7 shape matching, and HAM10000 skin lesion data set. These data sets are commonly used in the above methods for featurization, and we use them to evaluate predictive utility in real-world applications.