Space-Efficient Approximate Spherical Range Counting in High Dimensions

Abstract

We study the following range searching problem in high-dimensional Euclidean spaces: given a finite set $P\subset \mathbb{R}^d$, where each $p\in P$ is assigned a weight $w_p$, and radius $r>0$, we need to preprocess $P$ into a data structure such that when a new query point $q\in \mathbb{R}^d$ arrives, the data structure reports the cumulative weight of points of $P$ within Euclidean distance $r$ from $q$. Solving the problem exactly seems to require space usage that is exponential to the dimension, a phenomenon known as the curse of dimensionality. Thus, we focus on approximate solutions where points up to $(1+\varepsilon)r$ away from $q$ may be taken into account, where $\varepsilon>0$ is an input parameter known during preprocessing. We build a data structure with near-linear space usage, and query time in $n^{1-\Theta(\varepsilon^4/\log(1/\varepsilon))}+t_q^{\varrho}\cdot n^{1-\varrho}$, for some $\varrho=\Theta(\varepsilon^2)$, where $t_q$ is the number of points of $P$ in the ambiguity zone, i.e., at distance between $r$ and $(1+\varepsilon)r$ from the query $q$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first data structure with efficient space usage (subquadratic or near-linear for any $\varepsilon>0$) and query time that remains sublinear for any sublinear $t_q$. We supplement our worst-case bounds with a query-driven preprocessing algorithm to build data structures that are well-adapted to the query distribution.