  A filtration over a simplicial complex $K$ is an ordering of the simplices of
$K$ such that all prefixes in the ordering are subcomplexes of $K$. Filtrations
are at the core of Persistent Homology, a major tool in Topological Data
Analysis. In order to represent the filtration of a simplicial complex, the
entire filtration can be appended to any data structure that explicitly stores
all the simplices of the complex such as the Hasse diagram or the recently
introduced Simplex Tree [Algorithmica '14]. However, with the popularity of
various computational methods that need to handle simplicial complexes, and
with the rapidly increasing size of the complexes, the task of finding a
compact data structure that can still support efficient queries is of great
interest.
  In this paper, we propose a new data structure called the Critical Simplex
Diagram (CSD) which is a variant of the Simplex Array List (SAL) [Algorithmica
'17]. Our data structure allows one to store in a compact way the filtration of
a simplicial complex, and allows for the efficient implementation of a large
range of basic operations. Moreover, we prove that our data structure is
essentially optimal with respect to the requisite storage space. Finally, we
show that the CSD representation admits fast construction algorithms for Flag
complexes and relaxed Delaunay complexes.
