Identifiability of Points and Rigidity of Hypergraphs under Algebraic Constraints

Identifiability of data is one of the fundamental problems in data science. Mathematically it is often formulated as the identifiability of points satisfying a given set of algebraic relations. A key question then is to identify sufficient conditions for observations to guarantee the identifiability of the points. This paper proposes a new general framework for capturing the identifiability problem when a set of algebraic relations has a combinatorial structure and develops tools to analyze the impact of the underlying combinatorics on the local or global identifiability of points. Our framework is built on the language of graph rigidity, where the measurements are Euclidean distances between two points, but applicable in the generality of hypergraphs with arbitrary algebraic measurements. We establish necessary and sufficient (hyper)graph theoretical conditions for identifiability by exploiting techniques from graph rigidity theory and algebraic geometry of secant varieties.