Given a set @math of @math points in the plane, we study the computation of the probability distribution function of both the area and perimeter of the convex hull of a random subset @math of @math . The random subset @math is formed by drawing each point @math of @math independently with a given rational probability @math . For both measures of the convex hull, we show that it is #P-hard to compute the probability that the measure is at least a given bound @math . For @math , we provide an algorithm that runs in @math time and returns a value that is between the probability that the area is at least @math , and the probability that the area is at least @math . For the perimeter, we show a similar algorithm running in @math time. Finally, given @math and for any measure, we show an @math -time Monte Carlo algorithm that returns a value that, with probability of success at least @math , differs at most @math from the probability that the measure is at least @math .
In a more general model of discrete probabilistic points (called multipoint model @cite_0 ), each of the @math points either does not occur or occurs at one of finitely many locations, following its own discrete probability distribution. In this model that generalizes the one considered in this paper, @cite_0 gave exact computations and approximations of the probability that a query point lies in the convex hull, and @cite_12 considered the minimum enclosing ball problem and gave a @math -approximation. In this more general model and other ones, @cite_10 studied approximations of the distribution functions of the solutions of geometric shape-fitting problems, and described the variation of the solutions to these problems with respect to the uncertainty of the points. They noted that in the multipoint model the distribution of area or perimeter of the convex hull may have exponential complexity if all the points lie on or near a circle.
@cite_0 @cite_10 @cite_12
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Consider a set of points in d dimensions where the existence or the location of each point is determined by a probability distribution. The convex hull of this set is a random variable distributed over exponentially many choices. We are interested in finding the most likely convex hull, namely, the one with the maximum probability of occurrence. We investigate this problem under two natural models of uncertainty: the point (also called the tuple) model where each point (site) has a fixed position s i but only exists with some probability π i , for 0 < π i ≤ 1, and the multipoint model where each point has multiple possible locations or it may not appear at all. We show that the most likely hull under the point model can be computed in O(n 3) time for n points in d = 2 dimensions, but it is NP–hard for d ≥ 3 dimensions. On the other hand, we show that the problem is NP–hard under the multipoint model even for d = 2 dimensions. We also present hardness results for approximating the probability of the most likely hull. While we focus on the most likely hull for concreteness, our results hold for other natural definitions of a probabilistic hull. We study the convex-hull problem in a probabilistic setting, motivated by the need to handle data uncertainty inherent in many applications, including sensor databases, location-based services and computer vision. In our framework, the uncertainty of each input site is described by a probability distribution over a finite number of possible locations including a location to account for non-existence of the point. Our results include both exact and approximation algorithms for computing the probability of a query point lying inside the convex hull of the input, time-space tradeoffs for the membership queries, a connection between Tukey depth and membership queries, as well as a new notion of @math -hull that may be a useful representation of uncertain hulls. This paper deals with computing the smallest enclosing ball of a set of points subject to probabilistic data. In our setting, any of the n points may not or may occur at one of finitely many locations, following its own discrete probability distribution. The objective is therefore considered to be a random variable and we aim at finding a center minimizing the expected maximum distance to the points according to their distributions. Our main contribution presented in this paper is the first polynomial time (1 + e)-approximation algorithm for the probabilistic smallest enclosing ball problem with extensions to the streaming setting. We study the convex-hull problem in a probabilistic setting, motivated by the need to handle data uncertainty inherent in many applications, including sensor databases, location-based services and computer vision. In our framework, the uncertainty of each input point is described by a probability distribution over a finite number of possible locations including a null location to account for non-existence of the point. Our results include both exact and approximation algorithms for computing the probability of a query point lying inside the convex hull of the input, time–space tradeoffs for the membership queries, a connection between Tukey depth and membership queries, as well as a new notion of ( )-hull that may be a useful representation of uncertain hulls. We describe an @math -time algorithm for computing the exact probability that two @math -dimensional probabilistic point sets are linearly separable, for any fixed @math . A probabilistic point in @math -space is a normal point, but with an associated probability of existence; the existence probabilities of all points are independent. We also show that the @math -dimensional separability problem is equivalent to a @math -dimensional convex hull membership problem, which asks for the probability that a query point lies inside the convex hull of @math probabilistic points. Using this reduction, we improve the current best bound for the convex hull membership problem by a factor of @math . In addition, our algorithms can handle input degeneracies in which more than @math points may lie on a @math -dimensional subspace, thus resolving an open problem in 2013. Finally, we prove lower bounds for the separability problem via a reduction from the @math -SUM problem, which show in particular that our @math algorithms for @math -dimensional separability and @math -dimensional convex hull membership are nearly optimal. We study computing geometric problems on uncertain points. An uncertain point is a point that does not have a fixed location, but rather is described by a probability distribution. When these probability distributions are restricted to a finite number of locations, the points are called indecisive points. In particular, we focus on geometric shape-fitting problems and on building compact distributions to describe how the solutions to these problems vary with respect to the uncertainty in the points. Our main results are: (1) a simple and efficient randomized approximation algorithm for calculating the distribution of any statistic on uncertain data sets; (2) a polynomial, deterministic and exact algorithm for computing the distribution of answers for any LP-type problem on an indecisive point set; and (3) the development of shape inclusion probability (SIP) functions which captures the ambient distribution of shapes fit to uncertain or indecisive point sets and are admissible to the two algorithmic constructions. Given a set of @math n points, each is painted by one of the @math k given colors, we want to choose @math k points with distinct colors to form a color spanning set. For each color spanning set, we can construct the convex hull and the smallest axis-aligned enclosing rectangle, etc. Assuming that each point is chosen independently and identically from the subset of points of the same color, we propose an @math O ( n 2 ) time algorithm to compute the expected area of convex hulls of the color spanning sets and an @math O ( n 2 ) time algorithm to compute the expected perimeter of convex hulls of the color spanning sets. For the expected perimeter (resp. area) of the smallest perimeter (resp. area) axis-aligned enclosing rectangles of the color spanning sets, we present an @math O ( n log n ) (resp. @math O ( n 2 ) ) time algorithm. We also propose a simple approximation algorithm to compute the expected diameter of the color spanning sets. For the expected distance of the closest pair, we show that it is @math # P-complete to compute and there exists no polynomial time @math 2 n 1 - ? approximation algorithm to compute the probability that the closest pair distance of all color spanning sets equals to a given value @math d unless @math P = N P , even in one dimension and when each color paints two points. We study computing with indecisive point sets. Such points have spatial uncertainty where the true location is one of a finite number of possible locations. This data arises from probing distributions a few times or when the location is one of a few locations from a known database. In particular, we study computing distributions of geometric functions such as the radius of the smallest enclosing ball and the diameter. Surprisingly, we can compute the distribution of the radius of the smallest enclosing ball exactly in polynomial time, but computing the same distribution for the diameter is #P-hard. We generalize our polynomial-time algorithm to all LP-type problems. We also utilize our indecisive framework to deterministically and approximately compute on a more general class of uncertain data where the location of each point is given by a probability distribution. With the dramatic growth in the number of application domains that generate probabilistic, noisy and uncertain data, there has been an increasing interest in designing algorithms for geometric or combinatorial optimization problems over such data. In this paper, we initiate the study of constructing epsilon-kernel coresets for uncertain points. We consider uncertainty in the existential model where each point's location is fixed but only occurs with a certain probability, and the locational model where each point has a probability distribution describing its location. An epsilon-kernel coreset approximates the width of a point set in any direction. We consider approximating the expected width (an epsilon-EXP-KERNEL), as well as the probability distribution on the width (an (epsilon, tau)-QUANT-KERNEL) for any direction. We show that there exists a set of O(epsilon^ -(d-1) 2 ) deterministic points which approximate the expected width under the existential and locational models, and we provide efficient algorithms for constructing such coresets. We show, however, it is not always possible to find a subset of the original uncertain points which provides such an approximation. However, if the existential probability of each point is lower bounded by a constant, an epsilon-EXP-KERNEL is still possible. We also provide efficient algorithms for construct an (epsilon, tau)-QUANT-KERNEL coreset in nearly linear time. Our techniques utilize or connect to several important notions in probability and geometry, such as Kolmogorov distances, VC uniform convergence and Tukey depth, and may be useful in other geometric optimization problem in stochastic settings. Finally, combining with known techniques, we show a few applications to approximating the extent of uncertain functions, maintaining extent measures for stochastic moving points and some shape fitting problems under uncertainty. Let S be a set of n points in the Euclidean plane. The convex layers of S are the convex polygons obtained by iterating on the following procedure: compute the convex hull of S and remove its vertices from S . This process of peeling a planar point set is central in the study of robust estimators in statistics. It also provides valuable information on the morphology of a set of sites and has proven to be an efficient preconditioning for range search problems. An optimal algorithm is described for computing the convex layers of S. The algorithm runs in 0 (n n) time and requires O(n) space. Also addressed is the problem of determining the depth of a query point within the convex layers of S , i.e., the number of layers that enclose the query point. This is essentially a planar point location problem, for which optimal solutions are therefore known. Taking advantage of structural properties of the problem, however, a much simpler optimal solution is derived. In this paper, we study the linear separability problem for stochastic geometric objects under the well-known unipoint multipoint uncertainty models. Let S=S_R U S_B be a given set of stochastic bichromatic points, and define n = min |S_R|, |S_B| and N = max |S_R|, |S_B| . We show that the separable-probability (SP) of S can be computed in O(nN^ d-1 ) time for d >= 3 and O(min nN log N, N^2 ) time for d=2, while the expected separation-margin (ESM) of S can be computed in O(nN^d) time for d >= 2. In addition, we give an Omega(nN^ d-1 ) witness-based lower bound for computing SP, which implies the optimality of our algorithm among all those in this category. Also, a hardness result for computing ESM is given to show the difficulty of further improving our algorithm. As an extension, we generalize the same problems from points to general geometric objects, i.e., polytopes and or balls, and extend our algorithms to solve the generalized SP and ESM problems in O(nN^d) and O(nN^ d+1 ) time, respectively. Finally, we present some applications of our algorithms to stochastic convex-hull related problems. Finite convex geometries are combinatorial structures. It follows from a recent result of M. Richter and L.G. Rogers that there is an infinite set @math of planar convex polygons such that @math with respect to geometric convex hulls is a locally convex geometry and every finite convex geometry can be represented by restricting the structure of @math to a finite subset in a natural way. An @math is a differentiable convex simple closed curve @math in the plane having an inscribed circle of radius @math and a circumscribed circle of radius @math such that the ratio @math is at least @math . Motivated by Richter and Rogers' result, we construct a set @math such that (1) @math contains all points of the plane as degenerate singleton circles and all of its non-singleton members are differentiable convex simple closed planar curves; (2) @math with respect to the geometric convex hull operator is a locally convex geometry; (3) as opposed to @math , @math is closed with respect to non-degenerate affine transformations; and (4) for every (small) positive @math and for every finite convex geometry, there are continuum many pairwise affine-disjoint finite subsets @math of @math such that each @math consists of almost-circles of accuracy @math and the convex geometry in question is represented by restricting the convex hull operator to @math . The affine-disjointness of @math and @math means that, in addition to @math , even @math is disjoint from @math for every non-degenerate affine transformation @math . We propose a general framework for nonparametric classification of multi-dimensional numerical patterns. Given training points for each class, it builds a set cover with convex sets each of which contains some training points of the class but no points of the other classes. Each convex set has thus an associated class label, and classification of a query point is made to the class of the convex set such that the projection of the query point onto its boundary is minimal. In this sense, the convex sets of a class are regarded as ''prototypes'' for that class. We then apply this framework to two special types of convex sets, minimum enclosing balls and convex hulls, giving algorithms for constructing a set cover with them and for computing the projection length onto their boundaries. For convex hulls, we also give a method for implicitly evaluating whether a point is contained in a convex hull, which can avoid computational difficulty for explicit construction of convex hulls in high-dimensional space. We study the complexity of geometric minimum spanning trees under a stochastic model of input: Suppose we are given a master set of points s1,s_2,...,sn in d-dimensional Euclidean space, where each point si is active with some independent and arbitrary but known probability pi. We want to compute the expected length of the minimum spanning tree (MST) of the active points. This particular form of stochastic problems is motivated by the uncertainty inherent in many sources of geometric data but has not been investigated before in computational geometry to the best of our knowledge. Our main results include the following. We show that the stochastic MST problem is SPHARD for any dimension d ≥ 2. We present a simple fully polynomial randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS) for a metric space, and thus also for any Euclidean space. For d=2, we present two deterministic approximation algorithms: an O(n4)-time constant-factor algorithm, and a PTAS based on a combination of shifted quadtrees and dynamic programming. We show that in a general metric space the tail bounds of the distribution of the MST length cannot be approximated to any multiplicative factor in polynomial time under the assumption that P ≠ NP. In addition to this existential model of stochastic input, we also briefly consider a locational model where each point is present with certainty but its location is probabilistic. We study exact recovery conditions for convex relaxations of point cloud clustering problems, focusing on two of the most common optimization problems for unsupervised clustering: @math -means and @math -median clustering. Motivations for focusing on convex relaxations are: (a) they come with a certificate of optimality, and (b) they are generic tools which are relatively parameter-free, not tailored to specific assumptions over the input. More precisely, we consider the distributional setting where there are @math clusters in @math and data from each cluster consists of @math points sampled from a symmetric distribution within a ball of unit radius. We ask: what is the minimal separation distance between cluster centers needed for convex relaxations to exactly recover these @math clusters as the optimal integral solution? For the @math -median linear programming relaxation we show a tight bound: exact recovery is obtained given arbitrarily small pairwise separation @math between the balls. In other words, the pairwise center separation is @math . Under the same distributional model, the @math -means LP relaxation fails to recover such clusters at separation as large as @math . Yet, if we enforce PSD constraints on the @math -means LP, we get exact cluster recovery at center separation @math . In contrast, common heuristics such as Lloyd's algorithm (a.k.a. the @math -means algorithm) can fail to recover clusters in this setting; even with arbitrarily large cluster separation, k-means++ with overseeding by any constant factor fails with high probability at exact cluster recovery. To complement the theoretical analysis, we provide an experimental study of the recovery guarantees for these various methods, and discuss several open problems which these experiments suggest. In this paper we present several results on the expected complexity of a convex hull of @math points chosen uniformly and independently from a convex shape. (i) We show that the expected number of vertices of the convex hull of @math points, chosen uniformly and independently from a disk is @math , and @math for the case a convex polygon with @math sides. Those results are well known (see rs-udkhv-63,r-slcdn-70,ps-cgi-85 ), but we believe that the elementary proof given here are simpler and more intuitive. (ii) Let @math be a set of directions in the plane, we define a generalized notion of convexity induced by @math , which extends both rectilinear convexity and standard convexity. We prove that the expected complexity of the @math -convex hull of a set of @math points, chosen uniformly and independently from a disk, is @math , where @math is the largest angle between two consecutive vectors in @math . This result extends the known bounds for the cases of rectilinear and standard convexity. (iii) Let @math be an axis parallel hypercube in @math . We prove that the expected number of points on the boundary of the quadrant hull of a set @math of @math points, chosen uniformly and independently from @math is @math . Quadrant hull of a set of points is an extension of rectilinear convexity to higher dimensions. In particular, this number is larger than the number of maxima in @math , and is also larger than the number of points of @math that are vertices of the convex hull of @math . Those bounds are known bkst-anmsv-78 , but we believe the new proof is simpler. The convex hull of a set of points is the smallest convex set that contains the points. This article presents a practical convex hull algorithm that combines the two-dimensional Quickhull algorithm with the general-dimension Beneath-Beyond Algorithm. It is similar to the randomized, incremental algorithms for convex hull and delaunay triangulation. We provide empirical evidence that the algorithm runs faster when the input contains nonextreme points and that it used less memory. computational geometry algorithms have traditionally assumed that input sets are well behaved. When an algorithm is implemented with floating-point arithmetic, this assumption can lead to serous errors. We briefly describe a solution to this problem when computing the convex hull in two, three, or four dimensions. The output is a set of “thick” facets that contain all possible exact convex hulls of the input. A variation is effective in five or more dimensions. Given a set @math of m unit disks and a set @math of n points in the plane, the discrete unit disk cover problem is to select a minimum cardinality subset @math to cover @math . This problem is NP-hard [14] and the best previous practical solution is a 38-approximation algorithm by [5]. We first consider the line-separable discrete unit disk cover problem (the set of disk centers can be separated from the set of points by a line) for which we present an O(n(log n + m))-time algorithm that finds an exact solution. Combining our line-separable algorithm with techniques from the algorithm of [5] results in an O(m2n4) time 22-approximate solution to the discrete unit disk cover problem. Convex geometries are closure systems satisfying the anti-exchange axiom. Every finite convex geometry can be embedded into a convex geometry of finitely many points in an n-dimensional space equipped with a convex hull operator, by the result of K. Kashiwabara, M.Nakamura and Y.Okamoto (2005). Allowing circles rather than points, as was suggested by G.Cz 'edli (2014), may presumably reduce the dimension for representation. This paper introduces a property, the Weak @math -Carousel rule, which is satisfied by all convex geometries of circles on a plane, and we show that it does not hold in all finite convex geometries. This raises a number of representation problems for convex geometries, which may allow us to better understand the properties of Euclidean space related to its dimension. We consider the problem of estimating the discrete clustering structures under Sub-Gaussian Mixture Models. Our main results establish a hidden integrality property of a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for this problem: while the optimal solutions to the SDP are not integer-valued in general, their estimation errors can be upper bounded in terms of the error of an idealized integer program. The error of the integer program, and hence that of the SDP, are further shown to decay exponentially in the signal-to-noise ratio. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exponentially decaying error bound for convex relaxations of mixture models, and our results reveal the "global-to-local" mechanism that drives the performance of the SDP relaxation. A corollary of our results shows that in certain regimes the SDP solutions are in fact integral and exact, improving on existing exact recovery results for convex relaxations. More generally, our results establish sufficient conditions for the SDP to correctly recover the cluster memberships of @math fraction of the points for any @math . As a special case, we show that under the @math -dimensional Stochastic Ball Model, SDP achieves non-trivial (sometimes exact) recovery when the center separation is as small as @math , which complements previous exact recovery results that require constant separation.