Probabilistic validation of homology computations for nodal domains
Konstantin Mischaikow, Thomas Wanner · 2012
Homology has long been accepted as an important computable tool for quantifying complex structures. In many applications, these structures arise as nodal domains of real-valued functions and are therefore amenable only to a numerical study based on suitable discretizations. Such an approach immediately raises the question of how accurate the resulting homology computations are. In this paper, we present a probabilistic approach to quantifying the validity of homology computations for nodal domains of random fields in one and two space dimensions, which furnishes explicit probabilistic a priori bounds for the suitability of certain discretization sizes. We illustrate our results for the special cases of random periodic fields and random trigonometric polynomials. 1. Introduction. The