Fréchet Means for Distributions of Persistence Diagrams

Given a distribution ρ on persistence diagrams and observations X1, ...Xn iid ∼ ρ we introduce an algorithm in this paper that estimates a Fréchet mean from the set of diagrams X1, ...Xn. If the underlying measure ρ is a combination of Dirac masses ρ = 1 m ∑m i=1 δZi then we prove the algorithm converges to a local minimum and a law of large numbers result for a Fréchet mean computed by the algorithm given observations drawn iid from ρ. We illustrate the convergence of an empirical mean computed by the algorithm to a population mean by simulations from Gaussian random fields.