Updating zigzag representatives efficiently
Computational Geometry
2026-07-17 v1 Algebraic Topology
Abstract
Computation of zigzag persistence has progressed in recent years, with results showing that complexities of many problems closely align with those in the non-zigzag setting. The major efficiency gap now lies in the updating of zigzag representatives. In this paper, we propose efficient algorithms for updating zigzag representatives based on a recent algorithm for extracting zigzag representatives from a decomposition of a constructed non-zigzag. The main difficulty for designing our update algorithms lies in the adjacency change occurring in two operations that elongate or shorten a filtration. Despite the adjacency change, we find that the update can still be done efficiently in quadratic time.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.16153,
title = {Updating zigzag representatives efficiently},
author = {Tamal K. Dey and Tao Hou and Dmitriy Morozov},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16153},
year = {2026}
}