Vector bundles for data alignment and dimensionality reduction

Jose Perea (Northeastern University)

Slides

A vector bundle can be thought of as a family of vector spaces parametrized by a fixed topological space. Vector bundles have rich structure, and arise naturally when trying to solve synchronization problems in data science. I will show in this talk how the classical machinery (e.g., classifying maps, characteristic classes, etc) can be adapted to the world of algorithms and noisy data, as well as the insights one can gain. In particular, I will describe a class of topology-preserving dimensionality reduction problems, whose solution reduces to embedding the total space of a particular data bundle. Applications to computational chemistry and dynamical systems will also be presented.