Coarse Embeddability of Wasserstein Space and the Space of Persistence Diagrams

Abstract

We prove an equivalence between open questions about the embeddability of the space of persistence diagrams and the space of probability distributions (i.e. Wasserstein space). It is known that for many natural metrics, no coarse embedding of either of these two spaces into Hilbert space exists. Some cases remain open, however. In particular, whether coarse embeddings exist with respect to the p-Wasserstein distance for \(1\le p\le 2\) remains an open question for the space of persistence diagrams and for Wasserstein space on the plane. In this paper, we show that embeddability for persistence diagrams is equivalent to embeddability for Wasserstein space on \(\mathbb {R}^2\). When \(p > 1\), Wasserstein space on \(\mathbb {R}^2\) is snowflake universal (an obstruction to embeddability into any Banach space of non-trivial type) if and only if the space of persistence diagrams is snowflake universal.