Stabilizing decomposition of multiparameter persistence modules

Abstract: While decomposition of one-parameter persistence modules behaves nicely, as demonstrated by the algebraic stability theorem, decomposition of multiparameter modules is known to be unstable in a certain precise sense. Until now, it has not been clear that there is any way to get around this and build a meaningful stability theory for multiparameter module decomposition. We introduce new tools, in particular $\epsilon$-refinements and $\epsilon$-erosion neighborhoods, to start building such a theory. We then define the $\epsilon$-pruning of a module, which is a new invariant acting like a ``refined barcode'' that shows great promise to extract features from a module by approximately decomposing it. Our main theorem can be interpreted as a generalization of the algebraic stability theorem to multiparameter modules up to a factor of $2r$, where $r$ is the maximal pointwise dimension of one of the modules. Furthermore, we show that the factor $2r$ is close to optimal. Finally, we discuss the possibility of strengthening the stability theorem for modules that decompose into pointwise low-dimensional summands, and pose a conjecture phrased purely in terms of basic linear algebra and graph theory that seems to capture the difficulty of doing this. We also show that this conjecture is relevant for other areas of multipersistence, like the computational complexity of approximating the interleaving distance, and recent applications of relative homological algebra to multipersistence.