Work

A finitely stable edit distance for merge trees

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In this paper, we defined a novel edit distance for merge trees, which we argued to be suitable for a broad range of applications. Relying also on some technical results contained in other works, we investigated its stability properties, which ended up being analogous to the ones of the 1-Wasserstein distance between persistence diagrams. We tested and compared our metric against the interleaving distance in several simulations and case studies, highlighting the trade-off between stability and sensitivity when choosing the appropriate metric for a given data analysis problem, much alike the bias-variance trade-off in statistical modeling. In the appendix, we also compared our metric with other edit distances appearing in the literature, with both theoretic and practical considerations.
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,200
OpenAlex ID: W4412814029
FWCI:
Cites: 49
Cited by:
Related to: 10