Stability of 2-Parameter Persistent Homology

The Čech and Rips constructions of persistent homology are stable with respect to perturbations of the input data. However, neither is robust to outliers, and both can be insensitive to topological structure of high-density regions of the data. A natural solution is to consider 2-parameter persistence. This paper studies the stability of 2-parameter persistent homology: we show that several related density-sensitive constructions of bifiltrations from data satisfy stability properties accommodating the addition and removal of outliers. Specifically, we consider the multicover bifiltration, Sheehy’s subdivision bifiltrations, and the degree bifiltrations. For the multicover and subdivision bifiltrations, we get 1-Lipschitz stability results closely analogous to the standard stability results for 1-parameter persistent homology. Our results for the degree bifiltrations are weaker, but they are tight, in a sense. As an application of our theory, we prove a law of large numbers for subdivision bifiltrations of random data.