Betti Numbers of Prodsimplicial Complexes for Directed Graphs with Applications to Word Reductions

We propose custom made cell complexes, in particular prodsimplicial complexes, in order to analyze data consisting of directed graphs. These are constructed by attaching cells that are products of simplices and are suited to study data of acyclic directed graphs, called here consistently directed graphs. We investigate possible values of the first and second Betti numbers and the types of cycles that generate nontrivial homology. We apply these tools to directed graphs associated with reductions of double occurrence words, words that are associated with DNA recombination processes in certain species of ciliates. We study the effects of word operations on the homology for these graphs.