On the Most Likely Voronoi Diagram and Nearest Neighbor Searching

Abstract

Let [Formula: see text] be a set of stochastic sites, where each site is a tuple [Formula: see text] consisting of a point [Formula: see text] in [Formula: see text]-dimensional space and a probability [Formula: see text] of existence. Given a query point [Formula: see text], we define its most likely nearest neighbor (LNN) as the site with the largest probability of being [Formula: see text]’s nearest neighbor. The Most Likely Voronoi Diagram (LVD) of [Formula: see text] is a partition of the space into regions with the same LNN. We investigate the complexity of LVD in one dimension and show that it can have size [Formula: see text] in the worst-case. We then show that under non-adversarial conditions, the size of the [Formula: see text]-dimensional LVD is significantly smaller: (1) [Formula: see text] if the input has only [Formula: see text] distinct probability values, (2) [Formula: see text] on average, and (3) [Formula: see text] under smoothed analysis. We also describe a framework for LNN search using Pareto sets, which gives a linear-space data structure and sub-linear query time in 1D for average and smoothed analysis models as well as the worst-case with a bounded number of distinct probabilities. The Pareto-set framework is also applicable to multi-dimensional LNN search via reduction to a sequence of nearest neighbor and spherical range queries.