Gromov-Hausdorff distances between quotient metric spaces

Abstract

The Hausdorff distance measures how far apart two sets are in a common metric space. By contrast, the Gromov-Hausdorff distance provides a notion of distance between two abstract metric spaces. How do these distances behave for quotients of spaces under group actions? Suppose a group $G$ acts by isometries on two metric spaces $X$ and $Y$. In this article, we study how the Hausdorff and Gromov-Hausdorff distances between $X$ and $Y$ and their quotient spaces $X/G$ and $Y/G$ are related. For the Hausdorff distance, we show that if $X$ and $Y$ are $G$-invariant subsets of a common metric space, then we have $d_{\mathrm{H}}(X,Y)=d_{\mathrm{H}}(X/G,Y/G)$. However, the Gromov-Hausdorff distance does not preserve this relationship: we show how to make the ratio $\frac{d_{\mathrm{GH}}(X/G,Y/G)}{d_{\mathrm{GH}}(X,Y)}$ both arbitrarily large and arbitrarily small, even if $X$ is an arbitrarily dense $G$-invariant subset of $Y$.