Complexity of Normalized Persistence Problems for Topological Data Analysis and Local Hamiltonians
Authors: Dominic Lowe, M. S. Kim, Roberto Bondesan, Ryu Hayakawa
Organizations: Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom · Department of Computing, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom · Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics & The Hakubi Center, Kyoto University, Japan
Abstract
Topological data analysis (TDA) is a machine learning technique that uses topology to extract patterns from data and has shown the potential to exhibit quantum advantage. A key concept in TDA is persistent homology, which measures the robustness of topological information at different lengthscales. In this paper, we introduce and study the problem of normalized persistence, a practically motivated and easily interpretable version of persistent homology that counts the fraction of holes that persist at different lengthscales. We prove that a variant of normalized persistence is DQC1-hard and contained in BQP, giving evidence of an exponential quantum speedup for TDA under the standard assumption that DQC1⊆BPP. These are the first DQC1-hardness results that are directly applicable to TDA instances. We also find a close connection between normalized persistence and the complexity of estimating spectral quantities in the low-energy subspace of local Hamiltonians. We study a family of such problems, including a low-energy normalized subtrace and spectral density. We show that these are DQC1-hard for O(1)-local Hamiltonians, strengthening previous results that required log-local interactions. We also introduce a variant of DQC1 with perfect completeness (SDQC1) to characterize the hardness of problems normalized by an exact kernel. This includes normalized persistence for O(1)-local Hamiltonians, which we show is SDQC1-hard.
We propose persistent discrete homology as a tool for topological data analysis and discuss its advantages over the existing methods. In particular, we provide empirical evidence that persistent discrete homology is more noise-resistant than persistent homology of the Vietoris-Rips complex for data coming from non-metric settings.
Many datasets encountered across a wide range of domains possess rich geometric and topological structure that is difficult to capture using conventional vector-based representations. Quantum machine learning offers the possibility of processing high-dimensional data in Hilbert spaces, but its practical success depends critically on how classical data is encoded into quantum states. We introduce \emph{quantum topological data encoding} (QTDE), a general framework for encoding topological information into quantum states via topology-driven quantum evolution. Our method generalises an existing topology-driven quantum encoding framework to higher-dimensional data. We test the proposed method on clique-complexes classification tasks, and provide preliminary evidence that topology-driven quantum representations can capture discriminative information beyond that available through direct comparisons of classical topological descriptors. The proposed quantum representations consistently outperform a baseline based on direct comparisons of the combinatorial Laplacians describing the underlying topological structure. We indicate several areas of application where the framework can be used to provide a more efficient and reliable data representation.
Adam Wesołowski, Dimitrios Thanos, Daniel Leykam +1
While persistent Laplacians (PL) offer a richer geometric representation of data than persistent homology, utilizing their full eigenspectrum for learning tasks is often hampered by high dimensionality and the ``varying length'' problem across different filtration scales. We propose a compact spectral representation that distills the persistent Laplacian into three mathematically grounded invariants: Betti numbers, the spectral gap, and analytic torsion. Across benchmark datasets including MNIST, QM-3D, and SKEMPI WT, we demonstrate that this reduced feature space captures the essential predictive signal of the full spectrum, and in some cases outperforms it, while significantly reducing computational overhead and preventing the noise introduced by higher-frequency eigenvalues. Our results suggest that these invariants provide a principled, fixed-length interface between spectral geometry and topological learning.