Estimating perimeter using graph cuts

Abstract

We investigate the estimation of the perimeter of a set by a graph cut of a random geometric graph. For $\Omega \subset D = (0,1)^d$, with $d \geq 2$, we are given $n$ random i.i.d. points on $D$ whose membership in $\Omega$ is known. We consider the sample as a random geometric graph with connection distance $\varepsilon>0$. We estimate the perimeter of $\Omega$ (relative to $D$) by the, appropriately rescaled, graph cut between the vertices in $\Omega$ and the vertices in $D \backslash \Omega$. We obtain bias and variance estimates on the error, which are optimal in scaling with respect to $n$ and $\varepsilon$. We consider two scaling regimes: the dense (when the average degree of the vertices goes to $\infty$) and the sparse one (when the degree goes to $0$). In the dense regime there is a crossover in the nature of approximation at dimension $d=5$: we show that in low dimensions $d=2,3,4$ one can obtain confidence intervals for the approximation error, while in higher dimensions one can only obtain error estimates for testing the hypothesis that the perimeter is less than a given number.