A Directed Cubical Framework for k-critical Bipersistence Modules

Abstract

In topological data analysis, multiparameter persistence modules (MPMs) are used to analyze data with multiple parameters. Summarizing topological information for MPMs is a non-trivial task; one useful summary of bipersistence modules is the fibered barcode \cite{lesnick2015interactive,lesnick2025fast}. In this paper, we use a directed topological construction of the parameter space of a bifiltration to extend the fibered barcode. Specifically, given a $k$-critical bifiltration $F$, we build an associated directed Euclidean cubical complex $C$ whose directed paths each correspond to a one-parameter subfiltration of $F$. The path space of $C$, $\di{C}$, is used to define the \emph{extended fibered barcode}, which contains all possible monotonically increasing paths in $C$. We show that there can be paths in $\di{C}$ which generate filtrations not obtainable along a line with positive slope, and that all lines with positive slope have a path in $\di{C}$ that generate an equivalent barcode. We introduce two types of equivalence for these restricted modules: combinatorial equivalence of diagrams, and simplicial equivalence of the filtrations generating the modules. We show that removing certain cubes from $C$ yields a subcomplex on which dihomotopic paths induce simplicially equivalent filtrations, and hence combinatorially equivalent diagrams.