IT-Talk: Persistent Homology in Practice: Scaling to Millions of Points with Flooder

Vortragende: Florian Graf (PLUS), Persistent Homology in Practice: Scaling to Millions of Points with Flooder
Datum & Uhrzeit: Dienstag, 10.03.2026, 13.30 - 14.30 Uhr 
Ort: FH Salzburg, Campus Urstein, Hörsaal 110, Urstein Süd 1, 5412 Puch / Salzburg

Topological data analysis aims to extract patterns from data that are overlooked by classical feature engineering. Its most important tool, persistent homology, provides a way to quantify the shape of data by detecting structures such as connected components, loops, and voids. However, computing persistent homology on large datasets is often impractical due to its unfavorable scaling with the number of data points.

 In this talk, we introduce Flood complexes and the open-source Python package [Flooder] (https://plus-rkwitt.github.io/flooder/), which overcome this limitation for 3D point clouds and enable computations for more than a million points within seconds. The talk includes an intuitive introduction to topology and persistent homology; only minimal mathematical background is needed.