Topological Detection of Hopf Bifurcations via Persistent Homology: A Functional Criterion From Time Series

In this paper, we propose a topological framework for detecting Hopf-type dynamical transitions directly from scalar time series. The method combines delay-coordinate reconstruction with persistent homology and uses the maximum persistence of one-dimensional homology classes as a scalar descriptor of cyclic structure. For the supercritical Hopf setting, we derive finite-resolution persistence bounds that relate detectability of the reconstructed periodic orbit to its geometry, sampling quality, and finite-data perturbations. A derivative-based estimator is then introduced to localize the critical parameter from the sampled topological functional. The approach is evaluated on the Hopf normal form, the Lorenz system, and a reduced Belousov–Zhabotinsky model. The numerical experiments show accurate finite-resolution localization of the corresponding transitions and illustrate the effects of embedding parameters, temporal sampling, smoothing, observational noise, and transient removal. These results support persistent homology as an interpretable data-driven tool for detecting geometric reorganizations in nonlinear time series.