Open Problems in Topological Machine Learning
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The brain is a network with rich topological structure. Clique topology (Reimann et al., 2017) used persistent homology to show that neocortical microcircuits form high-dimensional simplicial structures, far beyond random. PH-based connectivity fingerprints distinguish subjects, tasks, and disease states from fMRI. This post covers the key findings and open questions in topological neuroscience.
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Biology is full of shape: protein folding, cell morphology, gene expression manifolds. TDA has found major applications in single-cell RNA-seq analysis (Mapper for trajectory inference), protein structure comparison (PH-based structural fingerprints), and cancer genomics (topological signatures of tumour heterogeneity). This post surveys the key results and tools.
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Persistent homology can be applied directly to graphs by defining filtrations on nodes or edges (e.g., by WL colours, degree, or learned scalars). The resulting persistence diagrams encode global graph topology โ connectivity, cycles, cliques โ beyond what standard 1-WL GNNs can detect. This post covers WL-filtrations, extended persistence on graphs, and hybrid GNN+PH architectures.
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To train neural networks end-to-end with topological loss terms, we need to differentiate through the persistent homology computation. This post covers the gradient of persistence diagrams with respect to inputs (via sub-gradients through the reduction algorithm), differentiable vectorisations (PLLay, TopNet), and how to write a topological regulariser that encourages or discourages specific shape features during training.