arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Peter Pivovarov.
We introduce an empirical version of dual volumes within dual Brunn--Minkowski theory. These provide a simple model for computation and analysis under symmetrization, including moment inequalities. As an application, we derive a new proof of the Busemann intersection inequality that relies on counting points in slabs rather than working directly with volumes of slices.
The Petty projection inequality is a fundamental affine isoperimetric principle for convex sets. It has shaped several directions of research in convex geometry which forged new connections between projection bodies, centroid bodies, and mixed volume inequalities. We establish several different empirical forms of the Petty projection inequality by re-examining these key relationships from a stochastic perspective. In particular, we derive sharp extremal inequalities for several multiple-entry functionals of random convex sets, including mixed projection bodies and mixed volumes.
We establish a family of isoperimetric inequalities for sets that interpolate between intersection bodies and dual Lp centroid bodies. This provides a bridge between the Busemann intersection inequality and the Lutwak--Zhang inequality. The approach depends on new empirical versions of these inequalities.
We establish Central Limit Theorems for the volumes of intersections of $B_{p}^n$ (the unit ball of $\ell_p^n$) with uniform random subspaces of codimension $d$ for fixed $d$ and $n\to \infty$. As a corollary we obtain higher order approximations for expected volumes, refining previous results by Koldobsky and Lifschitz and approximations obtained from the Eldan--Klartag version of CLT for convex bodies. We also obtain a Central Limit Theorem for the Minkowski functional of the intersection body of $B_p^n$, evaluated on a random vector distributed uniformly on the unit sphere.
The Brunn-Minkowski and Prékopa-Leindler inequalities admit a variety of proofs that are inspired by convexity. Nevertheless, the former holds for compact sets and the latter for integrable functions so it seems that convexity has no special signficance. On the other hand, it was recently shown that the Brunn-Minkowski inequality, specialized to convex sets, follows from a local stochastic dominance for naturally associated random polytopes. We show that for the subclass of $\log$-concave functions and associated stochastic approximations, a similar stochastic dominance underlies the Prékopa-Leindler inequality.
In this note we study a conjecture of Madiman and Wang which predicted that the generalized Gaussian distribution minimizes the Rényi entropy of the sum of independent random variables. Through a variational analysis, we show that the generalized Gaussian fails to be a minimizer for the problem.
As a natural analog of Urysohn's inequality in Euclidean space, Gao, Hug, and Schneider showed in 2003 that in spherical or hyperbolic space, the total measure of totally geodesic hypersurfaces meeting a given convex body K is minimized when K is a geodesic ball. We present a random extension of this result by taking K to be the convex hull of finitely many points drawn according to a probability distribution and by showing that the minimum is attained for uniform distributions on geodesic balls. As a corollary, we obtain a randomized Blaschke--Santalo inequality on the sphere.
The spherical centroid body of a centrally-symmetric convex body in the Euclidean unit sphere is introduced. Two alternative definitions - one geometric, the other probabilistic in nature - are given and shown to lead to the same objects. The geometric approach is then used to establish a number of basic properties of spherical centroid bodies, while the probabilistic approach inspires the proof of a spherical analogue of the classical polar Busemann-Petty centroid inequality.
Building on work of Furstenberg and Tzkoni, we introduce ${\bf r}$-flag affine quermassintegrals and their dual versions. These quantities generalize affine and dual affine quermassintegrals as averages on flag manifolds (where the Grassmannian can be considered as a special case). We establish affine and linear invariance properties and extend fundamental results to this new setting. In particular, we prove several affine isoperimetric inequalities from convex geometry and their approximate reverse forms. We also introduce functional forms of these quantities and establish corresponding inequalities.
Alexandrov's inequalities imply that for any convex body $A$, the sequence of intrinsic volumes $V_1(A),\ldots,V_n(A)$ is non-increasing (when suitably normalized). Milman's random version of Dvoretzky's theorem shows that a large initial segment of this sequence is essentially constant, up to a critical parameter called the Dvoretzky number. We show that this near-constant behavior actually extends further, up to a different parameter associated with $A$. This yields a new quantitative reverse inequality that sits between the approximate reverse Urysohn inequality, due to Figiel--Tomczak-Jaegermann and Pisier, and the sharp reverse Urysohn inequality for zonoids, due to Hug--Schneider. In fact, we study concentration properties of the volume radius and mean width of random projections of $A$ and show how these lead naturally to such reversals.
We discuss isoperimetric inequalities for convex sets. These include the classical isoperimetric inequality and that of Brunn-Minkowski, Blaschke-Santalo, Busemann-Petty and their various extensions. We show that many such inequalities admit stronger randomized forms in the following sense: for natural families of associated random convex sets one has stochastic dominance for various functionals such as volume, surface area, mean width and others. By laws of large numbers, these randomized versions recover the classical inequalities. We give an overview of when such stochastic dominance arises and its applications in convex geometry and probability.
We prove a randomized version of the generalized Urysohn inequality relating mean-width to the other intrinsic volumes. To do this, we introduce a stochastic approximation procedure that sees each convex body K as the limit of intersections of Euclidean balls of large radii and centered at randomly chosen points. The proof depends on a new isoperimetric inequality for the intrinsic volumes of such intersections. If the centers are i.i.d. and sampled according to a bounded continuous distribution, then the extremizing measure is uniform on a Euclidean ball. If one additionally assumes that the centers have i.i.d. coordinates, then the uniform measure on a cube is the extremizer. We also discuss connections to a randomized version of the extended isoperimetric inequality and symmetrization techniques.
We discuss optimal constants in a recent result of Rudelson and Vershynin on marginal densities. We show that if $f$ is a probability density on $\R^n$ of the form $f(x)=\prod_{i=1}^n f_i(x_i)$, where each $f_i$ is a density on $\R$, say bounded by one, then the density of any marginal $π_E(f)$ is bounded by $2^{k/2}$, where $k$ is the dimension of $E$. The proof relies on an adaptation of Ball's approach to cube slicing, carried out for functions. Motivated by inequalities for dual affine quermassintegrals, we also prove an isoperimetric inequality for certain averages of the marginals of such $f$ for which the cube is the extremal case.
Let $μ$ be a probability measure on $\mathbb{R}^n$ with a bounded density $f$. We prove that the marginals of $f$ on most subspaces are well-bounded. For product measures, studied recently by Rudelson and Vershynin, our results show there is a trade-off between the strength of such bounds and the probability with which they hold. Our proof rests on new affinely-invariant extremal inequalities for certain averages of $f$ on the Grassmannian and affine Grassmannian. These are motivated by Lutwak's dual affine quermassintegrals for convex sets. We show that key invariance properties of the latter, due to Grinberg, extend to families of functions. The inequalities we obtain can be viewed as functional analogues of results due to Busemann--Straus, Grinberg and Schneider. As an application, we show that without any additional assumptions on $μ$, any marginal $π_E(μ)$, or a small perturbation thereof, satisfies a nearly optimal small-ball probability.
We obtain optimal inequalities for the volume of the polar of random sets, generated for instance by the convex hull of independent random vectors in Euclidean space. Extremizers are given by random vectors uniformly distributed in Euclidean balls. This provides a random extension of the Blaschke-Santalo inequality which, in turn, can be derived by the law of large numbers. The method involves generalized shadow systems, their connection to Busemann type inequalities, and how they interact with functional rearrangement inequalities.
We prove a central limit theorem for the volume of projections of the N-cube onto a random subspace of dimension n, when n is fixed and N tends to infinity. Randomness in this case is with respect to the Haar measure on the Grassmannian manifold.