Persistent Homology of Delay Embeddings

The objective of this study is to detect and quantify the periodic behavior of the signals using topological methods. We propose to use delay-coordinate embeddings as a tool to measure the periodicity of signals. Moreover, we use persistent homology for analyzing the structure of point clouds of delay-coordinate embeddings. A method for finding the appropriate value of delay is proposed based on the autocorrelation function of the signals. We apply this topological approach to wheeze signals by introducing a model based on their harmonic characteristics. Wheeze detection is performed using the first Betti numbers of a few number of landmarks chosen from embeddings of the signals.