Learning Topology of Curves with Application to Clustering

We propose a method for learning the intrinsic topology of a point set sampled from a curve embedded in a high-dimensional ambient space. Our approach does not rely on distances in the ambient space, and thus can recover the topology of sparsely sampled curves, a situation where extant manifold learning methods are expected to fail. We formulate a loss function based on the smoothness of a curve, and derive a greedy procedure for minimizing this loss function. We compare the efficacy of our approach with representative manifold learning and hierarchical clustering methods on both real and synthetic data.