Thanks for the link, I hadn’t seen your other blog.
I look forward to any other posts you make on the topic.

That’s a good question and one that I’ve been thinking about for a while. So far on this blog, I’ve been trying to focus on topics that are relatively simple and widely used. Persistence homology (which is what most people seem to mean by topological data analysis) hasn’t yet filtered out of the academic realm, and relies on fairly abstract concepts (like manifolds and homology.) Still, I’m tempted to use it as an excuse to introduce readers to these advanced ideas, and it would tie in well with other directions like manifold learning, so I will probably get to it eventually.

By the way, I have written about the mapper/Iris clustering algorithm, which is closely related to persistence homology. I also wrote a post about presistence homology a while back on my topology blog (http://ldtopology.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/topological-exploration-of-data-sets-persistent-homology/).

Thanks! I’m hoping to turn it into a book at some point, though I’m not sure exactly when. As I write more posts, my idea of what the book should cover and how to organize it keeps changing.

Good question. I have been thinking about writing a book that follows the rough outline of the blog, with changes based on what I’ve learned while writing it. Part of the reason I started writing this blog was to gauge how much interest there would be in this approach to data analysis.Based on the statistics that wordpress reports, there seems to be enough to justify writing a book.

That’s also a good suggestion about including references at the end of posts. I will try to go back through and add references where I can find good ones. Thanks for the comments!