Persistent cup product structures and related invariants

Abstract One-dimensional persistent homology is arguably the most important and heavily used computational tool in topological data analysis. Additional information can be extracted from datasets by studying multi-dimensional persistence modules and by utilizing cohomological ideas, e.g. the cohomological cup product. In this work, given a single parameter filtration, we investigate a certain 2-dimensional persistence module structure associated with persistent cohomology, where one parameter is the cup-length $$\ell \ge 0$$ ℓ ≥ 0 and the other is the filtration parameter. This new persistence structure, called the persistent cup module , is induced by the cohomological cup product and adapted to the persistence setting. Furthermore, we show that this persistence structure is stable. By fixing the cup-length parameter $$\ell $$ ℓ , we obtain a 1-dimensional persistence module, called the persistent $$\ell $$ ℓ -cup module, and again show it is stable in the interleaving distance sense, and study their associated generalized persistence diagrams. In addition, we consider a generalized notion of a persistent invariant , which extends both the rank invariant (also referred to as persistent Betti number ), Puuska’s rank invariant induced by epi-mono-preserving invariants of abelian categories, and the recently-defined persistent cup-length invariant , and we establish their stability. This generalized notion of persistent invariant also enables us to lift the Lyusternik-Schnirelmann (LS) category of topological spaces to a novel stable persistent invariant of filtrations, called the persistent LS-category invariant .