Structure and Interleavings of Relative Interlevel Set Cohomology

Abstract: The relative interlevel set cohomology (RISC) is an invariant of real-valued continuous functions closely related to the Mayer--Vietoris pyramid introduced by Carlsson, de Silva, and Morozov. As such, the relative interlevel set cohomology is a parametrization of the cohomology vector spaces of all open interlevel sets relative complements of closed interlevel sets. We provide a structure theorem, which applies to the RISC of real-valued continuous functions whose open interlevel sets have finite-dimensional cohomology in each degree. Moreover, we show this tameness assumption is in some sense equivalent to $q$-tameness as introduced by Chazal, de Silva, Glisse, and Oudot. Furthermore, we provide the notion of an interleaving for RISC and we show that it is stable in the sense that any space with two functions that are $\delta$-close induces a $\delta$-interleaving of the corresponding relative interlevel set cohomologies. Finally, we provide an elementary form of quantitative homotopy invariance for RISC.