Persistent Homology of Delay Embeddings and its Application to Wheeze Detection

We propose a new approach to detect and quantify the periodic structure of dynamical systems using topological methods. We propose to use delay-coordinate embedding as a tool to detect the presence of harmonic structures by using persistent homology for robust analysis of point clouds of delay-coordinate embeddings. To discover the proper delay, we propose an autocorrelation like (ACL) function of the signals, and apply the introduced topological approach to analyze breathing sound signals for wheeze detection. Experiments have been carried out to substantiate the capabilities of the proposed method.