396 research outputs found
Parallel Algorithms for Geometric Graph Problems
We give algorithms for geometric graph problems in the modern parallel models
inspired by MapReduce. For example, for the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) problem
over a set of points in the two-dimensional space, our algorithm computes a
-approximate MST. Our algorithms work in a constant number of
rounds of communication, while using total space and communication proportional
to the size of the data (linear space and near linear time algorithms). In
contrast, for general graphs, achieving the same result for MST (or even
connectivity) remains a challenging open problem, despite drawing significant
attention in recent years.
We develop a general algorithmic framework that, besides MST, also applies to
Earth-Mover Distance (EMD) and the transportation cost problem. Our algorithmic
framework has implications beyond the MapReduce model. For example it yields a
new algorithm for computing EMD cost in the plane in near-linear time,
. We note that while recently Sharathkumar and Agarwal
developed a near-linear time algorithm for -approximating EMD,
our algorithm is fundamentally different, and, for example, also solves the
transportation (cost) problem, raised as an open question in their work.
Furthermore, our algorithm immediately gives a -approximation
algorithm with space in the streaming-with-sorting model with
passes. As such, it is tempting to conjecture that the
parallel models may also constitute a concrete playground in the quest for
efficient algorithms for EMD (and other similar problems) in the vanilla
streaming model, a well-known open problem
On Geometric Alignment in Low Doubling Dimension
In real-world, many problems can be formulated as the alignment between two
geometric patterns. Previously, a great amount of research focus on the
alignment of 2D or 3D patterns, especially in the field of computer vision.
Recently, the alignment of geometric patterns in high dimension finds several
novel applications, and has attracted more and more attentions. However, the
research is still rather limited in terms of algorithms. To the best of our
knowledge, most existing approaches for high dimensional alignment are just
simple extensions of their counterparts for 2D and 3D cases, and often suffer
from the issues such as high complexities. In this paper, we propose an
effective framework to compress the high dimensional geometric patterns and
approximately preserve the alignment quality. As a consequence, existing
alignment approach can be applied to the compressed geometric patterns and thus
the time complexity is significantly reduced. Our idea is inspired by the
observation that high dimensional data often has a low intrinsic dimension. We
adopt the widely used notion "doubling dimension" to measure the extents of our
compression and the resulting approximation. Finally, we test our method on
both random and real datasets, the experimental results reveal that running the
alignment algorithm on compressed patterns can achieve similar qualities,
comparing with the results on the original patterns, but the running times
(including the times cost for compression) are substantially lower
Simultaneous nearest neighbor search
Motivated by applications in computer vision and databases, we introduce and study the Simultaneous Nearest Neighbor Search (SNN) problem. Given a set of data points, the goal of SNN is to design a data structure that, given a collection of queries, finds a collection of close points that are compatible with each other. Formally, we are given k query points Q=q_1,...,q_k, and a compatibility graph G with vertices in Q, and the goal is to return data points p_1,...,p_k that minimize (i) the weighted sum of the distances from q_i to p_i and (ii) the weighted sum, over all edges (i,j) in the compatibility graph G, of the distances between p_i and p_j. The problem has several applications in computer vision and databases, where one wants to return a set of *consistent* answers to multiple related queries. Furthermore, it generalizes several well-studied computational problems, including Nearest Neighbor Search, Aggregate Nearest Neighbor Search and the 0-extension problem. In this paper we propose and analyze the following general two-step method for designing efficient data structures for SNN. In the first step, for each query point q_i we find its (approximate) nearest neighbor point p'_i; this can be done efficiently using existing approximate nearest neighbor structures. In the second step, we solve an off-line optimization problem over sets q_1,...,q_k and p'_1,...,p'_k; this can be done efficiently given that k is much smaller than n. Even though p'_1,...,p'_k might not constitute the optimal answers to queries q_1,...,q_k, we show that, for the unweighted case, the resulting algorithm satisfies a O(log k/log log k)-approximation guarantee. Furthermore, we show that the approximation factor can be in fact reduced to a constant for compatibility graphs frequently occurring in practice, e.g., 2D grids, 3D grids or planar graphs. Finally, we validate our theoretical results by preliminary experiments. In particular, we show that the empirical approximation factor provided by the above approach is very close to 1
On Geometric Alignment in Low Doubling Dimension
In real-world, many problems can be formulated as the alignment between two
geometric patterns. Previously, a great amount of research focus on the
alignment of 2D or 3D patterns, especially in the field of computer vision.
Recently, the alignment of geometric patterns in high dimension finds several
novel applications, and has attracted more and more attentions. However, the
research is still rather limited in terms of algorithms. To the best of our
knowledge, most existing approaches for high dimensional alignment are just
simple extensions of their counterparts for 2D and 3D cases, and often suffer
from the issues such as high complexities. In this paper, we propose an
effective framework to compress the high dimensional geometric patterns and
approximately preserve the alignment quality. As a consequence, existing
alignment approach can be applied to the compressed geometric patterns and thus
the time complexity is significantly reduced. Our idea is inspired by the
observation that high dimensional data often has a low intrinsic dimension. We
adopt the widely used notion "doubling dimension" to measure the extents of our
compression and the resulting approximation. Finally, we test our method on
both random and real datasets, the experimental results reveal that running the
alignment algorithm on compressed patterns can achieve similar qualities,
comparing with the results on the original patterns, but the running times
(including the times cost for compression) are substantially lower
Constant-Distortion Embeddings of Hausdorff Metrics into Constant-Dimensional l_p Spaces
We show that the Hausdorff metric over constant-size pointsets in constant-dimensional Euclidean space admits an embedding into constant-dimensional l_{infinity} space with constant distortion. More specifically for any s,d>=1, we obtain an embedding of the Hausdorff metric over pointsets of size s in d-dimensional Euclidean space, into l_{infinity}^{s^{O(s+d)}} with distortion s^{O(s+d)}. We remark that any metric space M admits an isometric embedding into l_{infinity} with dimension proportional to the size of M. In contrast, we obtain an embedding of a space of infinite size into constant-dimensional l_{infinity}.
We further improve the distortion and dimension trade-offs by considering probabilistic embeddings of the snowflake version of the Hausdorff metric. For the case of pointsets of size s in the real line of bounded resolution, we obtain a probabilistic embedding into l_1^{O(s*log(s()} with distortion O(s)
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