## Machine Learning Explanations with Topological Data Analysis

Guide for using Mapper for explaining a machine learning model.

We will demonstrate a novel application of Mapper to the domain of explanatory machine learning and show how Mapper can be used to understand not just the shape of data, but also understand a machine learning model.

## Čech Complex Playground

Interactive tools for understanding nerves

## Nerves and Towers I: Introduction

Fundamental concepts of Mapper and Multiscale Mapper.

In unsupervised learning, one of the main questions we want to answer is what type of structure does this set or shape have? The field of algebraic topology supplies a few tools to help answer this question. We can ask topological questions about the data, such as how many clusters or connected components are there? or are there gaps, holes, or voids in the data?. These question can be easy to answer if the shape is well defined, but in practice, we instead have data sampled from that shape. If…

## Nerves and Towers II: Nerves

An introduction to nerves, one of the fundamental building blocks of TDA.

The nerve is a simplicial complex built from a cover. It is a discrete summarization of the cover that captures the interesting topological features. Additionally, if the cover is sufficiently refined, then the nerve is guaranteed to preserve the topological features. A nerve of a cover is constructed in a very straight forward way: An (n-1)-dimensional simplex is added for each nonempty n-way intersection of elements of the cover.

## Nerves and Towers III: Towers

An introduction to towers, an extension of mapper to the world of persistence.

Once we understand the tower, we will show that it plays nice with all of the other definitions we have constructed so far and how it allows us to naturally define a multiscale mapper.

## What is Mapper?

Understanding of mapper from the ground up.

As one of the main tools from the field of Topological Data Analysis, Mapper has been shown to be particularly useful for exploring high dimensional point cloud data. This post will walk through the mapper construction from an intuitive perspective and demonstrate how it can be constructed on a toy example.

## An argument for TDD

A post about the Law of Demeter

I heard once that debugging and fixing defects amounts to half the cost of software development 1. Half of the time you spend writing code, you’re not actually writing code, your fixing code. It seems to me that a strong majority of the software development tools we have are devoted to this effort. Yeah, text editors are for writing code, but all the little tools like debuggers, print statements, and inspect element, are designed for fixing code. They are designed for decreasing the time…

## The Law of Demeter

A post about the Law of Demeter

The Law of Demeter is a small set of rules for how objects should interact with each other. It helps define the boundaries between objects and determine who controls and owns what. Applying this design principle gives each object their own personal space and keeps objects from micromanaging others.