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Kevin Buchin

Publications and source records attributed to Kevin Buchin.

65 records · Page 4Linked to original sources
arXiv2013

Trajectory Grouping Structures

The collective motion of a set of moving entities like people, birds, or other animals, is characterized by groups arising, merging, splitting, and ending. Given the trajectories of these entities, we define and model a structure that captures all of such changes using the Reeb graph, a concept from topology. The trajectory grouping structure has three natural parameters that allow more global views of the data in group size, group duration, and entity inter-distance. We prove complexity bounds on the maximum number of maximal groups that can be present, and give algorithms to compute the grouping structure efficiently. We also study how the trajectory grouping structure can be made robust, that is, how brief interruptions of groups can be disregarded in the global structure, adding a notion of persistence to the structure. Furthermore, we showcase the results of experiments using data generated by the NetLogo flocking model and from the Starkey project. The Starkey data describe the movement of elk, deer, and cattle. Although there is no ground truth for the grouping structure in this data, the experiments show that the trajectory grouping structure is plausible and has the desired effects when changing the essential parameters. Our research provides the first complete study of trajectory group evolvement, including combinatorial, algorithmic, and experimental results.

cs.CG↗
arXiv2012

Memory-Constrained Algorithms for Simple Polygons

A constant-workspace algorithm has read-only access to an input array and may use only O(1) additional words of $O(\log n)$ bits, where $n$ is the size of the input. We assume that a simple $n$-gon is given by the ordered sequence of its vertices. We show that we can find a triangulation of a plane straight-line graph in $O(n^2)$ time. We also consider preprocessing a simple polygon for shortest path queries when the space constraint is relaxed to allow $s$ words of working space. After a preprocessing of $O(n^2)$ time, we are able to solve shortest path queries between any two points inside the polygon in $O(n^2/s)$ time.

cs.CG↗
arXiv2012

Locally Correct Frechet Matchings

The Frechet distance is a metric to compare two curves, which is based on monotonous matchings between these curves. We call a matching that results in the Frechet distance a Frechet matching. There are often many different Frechet matchings and not all of these capture the similarity between the curves well. We propose to restrict the set of Frechet matchings to "natural" matchings and to this end introduce locally correct Frechet matchings. We prove that at least one such matching exists for two polygonal curves and give an O(N^3 log N) algorithm to compute it, where N is the total number of edges in both curves. We also present an O(N^2) algorithm to compute a locally correct discrete Frechet matching.

cs.CG↗
arXiv2011

Minimizing the Maximum Interference is Hard

We consider the following interference model for wireless sensor and ad hoc networks: the receiver interference of a node is the number of transmission ranges it lies in. We model transmission ranges as disks. For this case we show that choosing transmission radii which minimize the maximum interference while maintaining a connected symmetric communication graph is NP-complete.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2011

Angle-Restricted Steiner Arborescences for Flow Map Layout

We introduce a new variant of the geometric Steiner arborescence problem, motivated by the layout of flow maps. Flow maps show the movement of objects between places. They reduce visual clutter by bundling lines smoothly and avoiding self-intersections. To capture these properties, our angle-restricted Steiner arborescences, or flux trees, connect several targets to a source with a tree of minimal length whose arcs obey a certain restriction on the angle they form with the source. We study the properties of optimal flux trees and show that they are planar and consist of logarithmic spirals and straight lines. Flux trees have the shallow-light property. We show that computing optimal flux trees is NP-hard. Hence we consider a variant of flux trees which uses only logarithmic spirals. Spiral trees approximate flux trees within a factor depending on the angle restriction. Computing optimal spiral trees remains NP-hard, but we present an efficient 2-approximation, which can be extended to avoid "positive monotone" obstacles.

cs.CG↗
arXiv2011

Adjacency-Preserving Spatial Treemaps

Rectangular layouts, subdivisions of an outer rectangle into smaller rectangles, have many applications in visualizing spatial information, for instance in rectangular cartograms in which the rectangles represent geographic or political regions. A spatial treemap is a rectangular layout with a hierarchical structure: the outer rectangle is subdivided into rectangles that are in turn subdivided into smaller rectangles. We describe algorithms for transforming a rectangular layout that does not have this hierarchical structure, together with a clustering of the rectangles of the layout, into a spatial treemap that respects the clustering and also respects to the extent possible the adjacencies of the input layout.

cs.CG↗
arXiv2010

Drawing (Complete) Binary Tanglegrams: Hardness, Approximation, Fixed-Parameter Tractability

A \emph{binary tanglegram} is a drawing of a pair of rooted binary trees whose leaf sets are in one-to-one correspondence; matching leaves are connected by inter-tree edges. For applications, for example, in phylogenetics, it is essential that both trees are drawn without edge crossings and that the inter-tree edges have as few crossings as possible. It is known that finding a tanglegram with the minimum number of crossings is NP-hard and that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to that number. We prove that under the Unique Games Conjecture there is no constant-factor approximation for binary trees. We show that the problem is NP-hard even if both trees are complete binary trees. For this case we give an $O(n^3)$-time 2-approximation and a new, simple fixed-parameter algorithm. We show that the maximization version of the dual problem for binary trees can be reduced to a version of MaxCut for which the algorithm of Goemans and Williamson yields a 0.878-approximation.

cs.CG↗
arXiv2010

On the number of spanning trees a planar graph can have

We prove that any planar graph on $n$ vertices has less than $O(5{.}2852^n)$ spanning trees. Under the restriction that the planar graph is 3-connected and contains no triangle and no quadrilateral the number of its spanning trees is less than $O(2{.}7156^n)$. As a consequence of the latter the grid size needed to realize a 3d polytope with integer coordinates can be bounded by $O(147.{7}^n)$. Our observations imply improved upper bounds for related quantities: the number of cycle-free graphs in a planar graph is bounded by $O(6.4884^n)$, the number of plane spanning trees on a set of $n$ points in the plane is bounded by $O(158.6^n)$, and the number of plane cycle-free graphs on a set of $n$ points in the plane is bounded by $O(194{.}7^n)$.

math.CO↗
arXiv2009

Delaunay Triangulations in Linear Time? (Part I)

We present a new and simple randomized algorithm for constructing the Delaunay triangulation using nearest neighbor graphs for point location. Under suitable assumptions, it runs in linear expected time for points in the plane with polynomially bounded spread, i.e., if the ratio between the largest and smallest pointwise distance is polynomially bounded. This also holds for point sets with bounded spread in higher dimensions as long as the expected complexity of the Delaunay triangulation of a sample of the points is linear in the sample size.

cs.CG↗
arXiv2009

Vectors in a Box

For an integer d>=1, let tau(d) be the smallest integer with the following property: If v1,v2,...,vt is a sequence of t>=2 vectors in [-1,1]^d with v1+v2+...+vt in [-1,1]^d, then there is a subset S of {1,2,...,t} of indices, 2<=|S|<=tau(d), such that \sum_{i\in S} vi is in [-1,1]^d. The quantity tau(d) was introduced by Dash, Fukasawa, and Günlük, who showed that tau(2)=2, tau(3)=4, and tau(d)=Omega(2^d), and asked whether tau(d) is finite for all d. Using the Steinitz lemma, in a quantitative version due to Grinberg and Sevastyanov, we prove an upper bound of tau(d) <= d^{d+o(d)}, and based on a construction of Alon and Vu, whose main idea goes back to Hastad, we obtain a lower bound of tau(d)>= d^{d/2-o(d)}. These results contribute to understanding the master equality polyhedron with multiple rows defined by Dash et al., which is a "universal" polyhedron encoding valid cutting planes for integer programs (this line of research was started by Gomory in the late 1960s). In particular, the upper bound on tau(d) implies a pseudo-polynomial running time for an algorithm of Dash et al. for integer programming with a fixed number of constraints. The algorithm consists in solving a linear program, and it provides an alternative to a 1981 dynamic programming algorithm of Papadimitriou.

math.CO↗