A Lattice for Persistence

The intrinsic connection between lattice theory and topology is fairly well established. For instance, the collection of open subsets of a topological subspace always forms a distributive lattice. Persistent homology has been one of the most prominent areas of research in computational topology in the past 20 years. In this paper we will introduce an alternative interpretation of persistence based on the study of the order structure of its correspondent lattice. Its algorithmic construction leads to two operations on homology groups which describe an input diagram of spaces as a complete Heyting algebra, which is a generalization of a Boolean algebra. We investigate some of the properties of this lattice, the algorithmic implications of it, and some possible applications. Table of