Universality of the Homotopy Interleaving Distance

As a step towards establishing homotopy-theoretic foundations for topological data analysis (TDA), we introduce and study homotopy interleavings between filtered topological spaces. These are homotopy-invariant analogues of interleavings, objects commonly used in TDA to articulate stability and inference theorems. Intuitively, whereas a strict interleaving between filtered spaces X and Y certifies that X and Y are approximately isomorphic, a homotopy interleaving between X and Y certifies that X and Y are approximately weakly equivalent. The main results of this paper are that homotopy interleavings induce an extended pseudometric dHI on filtered spaces, and that this is the universal pseudometric satisfying natural stability and homotopy invariance axioms. To motivate these axioms, we also observe that dHI (or more generally, any pseudometric satisfying these two axioms and an additional "homology bounding" axiom) can be used to formulate lifts of several fundamental TDA theorems from the algebraic (homological) level to the level of filtered spaces. Finally, we consider the problem of establishing a persistent Whitehead theorem in terms of homotopy interleavings. We provide a counterexample to a naive formulation of the result.