Abstract

Metric Embedding plays an important role in a vast range of application areas such as computer vision, computational biology, machine learning, networking, statistics, and mathematical psychology, to name a few. The theory of metric embedding received much attention in recent years by mathematicians as well as computer scientists and has been applied in many algorithmic applications. A cornerstone of the field is a celebrated theorem of Bourgain which states that every finite metric space on n points embeds in Euclidean space with O(log n) distortion. Bourgain’s result is best possible when considering the worst case distortion over all pairs of points in the metric space. Yet, it is possible that an embedding can do much better in terms of the average distortion. Indeed, in most practical applications of metric embedding the main criteria for the quality of an embedding is its average distortion over all pairs. In this paper we provide an embedding with constant average distortion for arbitrary metric spaces, while maintaining the same worst case bound provided by Bourgain’s theorem. In fact, our embedding possesses a much stronger property. We define the ℓq-distortion of a uniformly distributed pair of points. Our embedding achieves the best possible ℓq-distortion for all 1 ≤ q ≤ ∞ simultaneously. These results have several algorithmic implications, e.g. an O(1) approximation for the unweighted uncapacitated quadratic assignment problem. The results are based on novel embedding methods which improve on previous methods in another important aspect: the dimension. The dimension of an embedding is of very high importance in particular in applications and much effort has been invested in analyzing it. However, no previous result im-

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