Most Likely Voronoi Diagrams in Higher Dimensions

Abstract

The Most Likely Voronoi Diagram is a generalization of the well known Voronoi Diagrams to a stochastic setting, where a stochastic point is a point associated with a given probability of existence, and the cell for such a point is the set of points which would classify the given point as its most likely nearest neighbor. We investigate the complexity of this subdivision of space in d dimensions. We show that in the general case, the complexity of such a subdivision is Omega(n^{2d}) where n is the number of points. This settles an open question raised in a recent (ISAAC 2014) paper of Suri and Verbeek, which first defined the Most Likely Voronoi Diagram. We also show that when the probabilities are assigned using a random permutation of a fixed set of values, in expectation the complexity is only ~O(n^{ceil{d/2}}) where the ~O(*) means that logarithmic factors are suppressed. In the worst case, this bound is tight up to polylog factors.