The doubling constant of a metric space (X; d) is thesmallest value * such that every ball in X can be covered by * balls of half the radius. The doubling dimension of X isthen defined as dim(X) = log2 *. A metric (or sequence ofmetrics) is called doubling precisely when its doubling dimension is bounded. This is a robust class of metric spaceswhich contains many families of metrics that occur in applied settings.We give tight bounds for embedding doubling metrics into (low-dimensional) normed spaces. We consider bothgeneral doubling metrics, as well as more restricted families such as those arising from trees, from graphs excludinga fixed minor, and from snowflaked metrics. Our techniques include decomposition theorems for doubling metrics, andan analysis of a fractal in the plane due to Laakso [21]. Finally, we discuss some applications and point out a centralopen question regarding dimensionality reduction in L2.

Geodesic active contours and graph cuts are two standard image segmentation techniques. We introduce a new segmentation method combining some of their benefits. Our main intuition is that any cut on a graph embedded in some continuous space can be interpreted as a contour (in 2D) or a surface (in 3D). We show how to build a grid graph and set its edge weights so that the cost of cuts is arbitrarily close to the length (area) of the corresponding contours (surfaces) for any anisotropic Riemannian metric. There are two interesting consequences of this technical result. First, graph cut algorithms can be used to find globally minimum geodesic contours (minimal surfaces in 3D) under arbitrary Riemannian metric for a given set of boundary conditions. Second, we show how to minimize metrication artifacts in existing graph-cut based methods in vision. Theoretically speaking, our work provides an interesting link between several branches of mathematics-differential geometry, integral geometry, and combinatorial optimization. The main technical problem is solved using Cauchy-Crofton formula from integral geometry. 1.

Given a set S of n sites (points), and a distance measure d, the nearest neighbor searching problem is to build a data structure so that given a query point q, the site nearest to q can be found quickly. This paper gives a data structure for this problem; the data structure is built using the distance function as a “black box”. The structure is able to speed up nearest neighbor searching in a variety of settings, for example: points in low-dimensional or structured Euclidean space, strings under Hamming and edit distance, and bit vector data from an OCR application. The data structures are observed to need linear space, with a modest constant factor. The preprocessing time needed per site is observed to match the query time. The data structure can be viewed as an application of a “kd-tree ” approach in the metric space setting, using Voronoi regions of a subset in place of axis-aligned boxes. 1

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The main question studied in this article may be viewed as a non-linear analog of Dvoretzky's Theorem in Banach space theory or as part of Ramsey Theory in combinatorics.

We study the problem of routing in doubling metrics, and show how to perform hierarchical routing in such metrics with small stretch and compact routing tables (i.e., with small amount of routing information stored at each vertex). We say that a metric (X, d) has doubling dimension dim(X) at most α if every set of diameter D can be covered by 2 α sets of diameter D/2. (A doubling metric is one whose doubling dimension dim(X) is a constant.) We show how to perform (1 + τ)-stretch routing on metrics for any 0 < τ ≤ 1 with routing tables of size at most (α/τ) O(α) log 2 ∆ bits with only (α/τ) O(α) log ∆ entries, where ∆ is the diameter of the graph; hence the number of routing table entries is just τ −O(1) log ∆ for doubling metrics. These results extend and improve on those of Talwar (2004). We also give better constructions of sparse spanners for doubling metrics than those obtained from the routing tables above; for τ> 0, we give algorithms to construct (1 + τ)stretch spanners for a metric (X, d) with maximum degree at most (2 + 1/τ) O(dim(X)) , matching the results of Das et al. for Euclidean metrics.

The Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma shows that any n points in Euclidean space (with distances measured by the L2 norm) may be mapped down to O((log n)/ep^2) dimensions such that no pairwise distance is distorted by more than a (1 ep) factor. Determining whether such dimension reduction is possible in L1 has been an intriguing open question. Charikar and Sahai [7] recently showed lower bounds for dimension reduction in L1 that can be achieved by linear projections, and positive results for shortest path metrics of restricted graph families. However the question of general dimension reduction in L1 was still open. For example, it was not known whether it is possible to reduce the number of dimensions to O(log n) with 1 ep distortion. We show strong lower bounds for general dimension reduction in L1. We give an explicity family of n points in L1 such that any embedding with distortion d requires n^Omega(1/d^2) dimensions. This proves that there is no analog of the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma for L1

MAX CUT is the problem of partitioning the vertices of a graph into two sets, maximizing the number of edges joining these sets. This problem is NP-hard. Goemans and Williamson proposed an algorithm that first uses a semidefinite programming relaxation of MAX CUT to embed the vertices of the graph on the surface of an n dimensional sphere, and then uses a random hyperplane to cut the sphere in two, giving a cut of the graph. They show that the expected number of edges in the random cut is at least ff \Delta sdp, where ff ' 0:87856 and sdp is the value of the semidefinite program, which is an upper bound on opt, the number of edges in the maximum cut. This manuscript shows the following results: 1. The integrality ratio of the semidefinite program is ff. The previously known bound on the integrality ratio was roughly 0:8845. 2. In the presence of the so called "triangle constraints", the integrality ratio is no better than roughly 0:891. The previously known bound was above ...

We survey how semidefinite programming can be used for finding good approximative solutions to hard combinatorial optimization problems.

We improve upon recent lower bounds on the minimum distortion of embedding certain finite metric spaces into L1. In particular, we show that for every n ≥ 1, there is an n-point metric space of negative type that requires a distortion of Ω(log log n) for such an embedding, implying the same lower bound on the integrality gap of a well-known semidefinite programming relaxation for sparsest cut. This result builds upon and improves the recent lower bound of (log log n) 1/6−o(1) due to Khot and Vishnoi [The unique games conjecture, integrality gap for cut problems and the embeddability of negative type metrics into l1, in Proceedings of the 46th Annual IEEE Symposium