Universality of persistence diagrams and the bottleneck and Wasserstein distances

Abstract: We prove that persistence diagrams with the p-Wasserstein distance form the universal p-subadditive commutative monoid on an underlying metric space with a distinguished subset. This result applies to persistence diagrams, barcodes, and to multiparameter persistence modules. In addition, the 1-Wasserstein distance satisfies Kantorovich-Rubinstein duality.