Near-diagonal asymptotics and the failure of strong universality in random Čech persistence

Abstract

The strong universality conjecture of Bobrowski and Skraba asserts that, under a prescribed data-dependent additive centering, the empirical laws of log-log transformed persistence ratios of random geometric complexes share a universal limit across sampling models, dimensions, filtrations, and homological degrees. They conjectured a left-skewed Gumbel limit and used it as a null law for testing topological significance. We show that, when the uncentered empirical laws and the centerings have deterministic limits, the conjecture forces a second-order quantity of each model's limiting law, determined by ratios close to one and unchanged by additive shifts, to agree across models and dimensions. To compute this quantity for degree-one Čech persistence, we bypass the global persistence pairing with a local proxy based on edges and their first incident triangles in the equivalent alpha filtration. In dimensions two and three, a Palm-Mecke calculation evaluates the proxy intensity exactly for stationary Poisson processes, and two-sided topological bounds show that it agrees with the true normalized persistence intensity through second order. After transfer to finite samples, the quantity equals $π^2/32$ and $4/π^2-1/4$ for the limiting laws of independent uniform samples from the unit square and the unit cube, respectively. The centered empirical laws converge weakly in probability to distinct deterministic limits, and their mean laws, the expectations of these random laws, also converge weakly to these limits. Hence the conjecture fails even for mean laws. Neither limiting law belongs to the left-skewed Gumbel location-scale family.