Mittagsseminar (in cooperation with J. Lengler, A. Steger, and D. Steurer)

Date and Time: Tuesday, September 24, 2019, 12:15 pm

Duration: 30 minutes

Location: OAT S15/S16/S17

Speaker: Bettina Speckmann (TU Eindhoven)

Preprocessing Ambiguous Imprecise Points

Let R = {R1, R2, . . . , Rn} be a set of regions and let X = {x1, x2, . . . , xn} be an (unknown) point set where xi lies in Ri. Region Ri represents the uncertainty region of xi. We consider the following question: how fast can we establish order if we are allowed to preprocess the regions in R? The preprocessing model of uncertainty uses two consecutive phases: a preprocessing phase which has access only to R followed by a reconstruction phase during which a desired structure on X is computed. Recent results in this model parametrize the reconstruction time by the ply of R, which is the maximum overlap between the regions in R. We introduce the ambiguity A(R) as a more fine-grained measure of the degree of overlap in R. We show how to preprocess a set of d-dimensional disks in O(n log n) time such that we can sort X (if d = 1) and reconstruct a quadtree on X (if d is greater or equal to 1 but constant) in O(A(R)) time. If A(R) is sub-linear, then reporting the result dominates the running time of the reconstruction phase. However, we can still return a suitable data structure representing the result in O(A(R)) time.

In one dimension, R is a set of intervals and the ambiguity is linked to interval entropy, which in turn relates to the well-studied problem of sorting under partial information. The number of comparisons necessary to find the linear order underlying a poset P is lower-bounded by the graph entropy of P. We show that if P is an interval order, then the ambiguity provides a constant-factor approximation of the graph entropy. This gives a lower bound of (A(R)) in all dimensions for the reconstruction phase (sorting or any proximity structure), independent of any preprocessing; hence our result is tight. Finally, our results imply that one can approximate the entropy of interval graphs in O(n log n) time, improving the O(n2.5) bound by Cardinal et al.

Joint work with Ivor van der Hoog, Irina Kostitsyna, and Maarten Löffler.

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