We define a class of invariants, which we call homological invariants, for persistence modules over a finite poset. Informally, a homological invariant is one that respects some homological data and takes values in the free abelian group generated by a finite set of indecomposable modules. We focus in particular on groups generated by “spread modules,” which are sometimes called “interval modules” in the persistence theory literature. We show that both the dimension vector and rank invariant are equivalent to homological invariants taking values in groups generated by spread modules. We also show that the free abelian group generated by the “single-source” spread modules gives rise to a new invariant which is finer than the rank invariant.

For every minimal one-sided shift space X over a finite alphabet, left special elements are those points in X having at least two preimages under the shift operation. In this paper, we show that the Cuntz–Pimsner -algebra has nuclear dimension when X is minimal and the number of left special elements in X is finite. This is done by describing concretely the cover of X, which also recovers an exact sequence, discovered before by Carlsen and Eilers.

It is shown that the colored isomorphism class of a unital, simple, -stable, separable amenable C-algebra satisfying the universal coefficient theorem is determined by its tracial simplex.