5 research outputs found
Approximating -center clustering for curves
The Euclidean -center problem is a classical problem that has been
extensively studied in computer science. Given a set of
points in Euclidean space, the problem is to determine a set of
centers (not necessarily part of ) such that the maximum
distance between a point in and its nearest neighbor in
is minimized. In this paper we study the corresponding
-center problem for polygonal curves under the Fr\'echet distance,
that is, given a set of polygonal curves in ,
each of complexity , determine a set of polygonal curves
in , each of complexity , such that the maximum Fr\'echet
distance of a curve in to its closest curve in is
minimized. In this paper, we substantially extend and improve the known
approximation bounds for curves in dimension and higher. We show that, if
is part of the input, then there is no polynomial-time approximation
scheme unless . Our constructions yield different
bounds for one and two-dimensional curves and the discrete and continuous
Fr\'echet distance. In the case of the discrete Fr\'echet distance on
two-dimensional curves, we show hardness of approximation within a factor close
to . This result also holds when , and the -hardness
extends to the case that , i.e., for the problem of computing the
minimum-enclosing ball under the Fr\'echet distance. Finally, we observe that a
careful adaptation of Gonzalez' algorithm in combination with a curve
simplification yields a -approximation in any dimension, provided that an
optimal simplification can be computed exactly. We conclude that our
approximation bounds are close to being tight.Comment: 24 pages; results on minimum-enclosing ball added, additional author
added, general revisio
Approximability of the Discrete {Fr\'echet} Distance
<p>The Fréchet distance is a popular and widespread distance measure for point sequences and for curves. About two years ago, Agarwal et al. [SIAM J. Comput. 2014] presented a new (mildly) subquadratic algorithm for the discrete version of the problem. This spawned a flurry of activity that has led to several new algorithms and lower bounds.</p><p>In this paper, we study the approximability of the discrete Fréchet distance. Building on a recent result by Bringmann [FOCS 2014], we present a new conditional lower bound showing that strongly subquadratic algorithms for the discrete Fréchet distance are unlikely to exist, even in the one-dimensional case and even if the solution may be approximated up to a factor of 1.399.</p><p>This raises the question of how well we can approximate the Fréchet distance (of two given -dimensional point sequences of length ) in strongly subquadratic time. Previously, no general results were known. We present the first such algorithm by analysing the approximation ratio of a simple, linear-time greedy algorithm to be . Moreover, we design an -approximation algorithm that runs in time , for any . Hence, an -approximation of the Fréchet distance can be computed in strongly subquadratic time, for any \varepsilon > 0.</p
LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volum