Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
414287 Computational Geometry 2014 10 Pages PDF
Abstract

Given a (master) set M of n points in d  -dimensional Euclidean space, consider drawing a random subset that includes each point mi∈Mmi∈M with an independent probability pipi. How difficult is it to compute elementary statistics about the closest pair of points in such a subset? For instance, what is the probability that the distance between the closest pair of points in the random subset is no more than ℓ, for a given value ℓ? Or, can we preprocess the master set M such that given a query point q, we can efficiently estimate the expected distance from q to its nearest neighbor in the random subset? These basic computational geometry problems, whose complexity is quite well-understood in the deterministic setting, prove to be surprisingly hard in our stochastic setting. We obtain hardness results and approximation algorithms for stochastic problems of this kind.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Computational Theory and Mathematics
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