The bifiltration of a relation and extended Dowker duality

Abstract

Abstract We explain how homotopical information of two composeable relations can be coherently combined within two different simplicial categories that respectively augment the relations row and column complexes. We show that both of these categories realize to weakly equivalent spaces, which amounts to a non-trivial extension of Dowker's duality theorem. We also prove a functorial version of this result. Specializing the above construction, a bifiltration of Dowker complexes that coherently incorporates the total weights of a relation's row and column complex into one single object is introduced. This construction is motivated by challenges in data analysis that necessitate the simultaneous study of spatial information derived from a data matrix's rows and columns. To illustrate the applicability of our constructions for solving those challenges we give an appropriate reconstruction result.