We consider a range-search variant of the closest-pair problem. Let Gamma be a fixed shape in the plane. We are interested in storing a given set of n points in the plane in some data structure such that for any specified translate of Gamma, the closest pair of points contained in the translate can be reported efficiently. We present results on this problem for two important settings: when Gamma is a polygon (possibly with holes) and when Gamma is a general convex body whose boundary is smooth. When Gamma is a polygon, we present a data structure using O(n) space and O(log n) query time, which is asymptotically optimal. When Gamma is a general convex body with a smooth boundary, we give a near-optimal data structure using O(n log n) space and O(log^2 n) query time. Our results settle some open questions posed by Xue et al. at SoCG 2018.

Given a dataset S of points in R^2, the range closest-pair (RCP) problem aims to preprocess S into a data structure such that when a query range X is specified, the closest-pair in S cap X can be reported efficiently. The RCP problem can be viewed as a range-search version of the classical closest-pair problem, and finds applications in many areas. Due to its non-decomposability, the RCP problem is much more challenging than many traditional range-search problems. This paper revisits the RCP problem, and proposes new data structures for various query types including quadrants, strips, rectangles, and halfplanes. Both worst-case and average-case analyses (in the sense that the data points are drawn uniformly and independently from the unit square) are applied to these new data structures, which result in new bounds for the RCP problem. Some of the new bounds significantly improve the previous results, while the others are entirely new.

In this paper, we study the linear separability problem for stochastic geometric objects under the well-known unipoint/multipoint uncertainty models. Let S=S_R U S_B be a given set of stochastic bichromatic points, and define n = min{|S_R|, |S_B|} and N = max{|S_R|, |S_B|}. We show that the separable-probability (SP) of S can be computed in O(nN^{d-1}) time for d >= 3 and O(min{nN log N, N^2}) time for d=2, while the expected separation-margin (ESM) of S can be computed in O(nN^d) time for d >= 2. In addition, we give an Omega(nN^{d-1}) witness-based lower bound for computing SP, which implies the optimality of our algorithm among all those in this category. Also, a hardness result for computing ESM is given to show the difficulty of further improving our algorithm. As an extension, we generalize the same problems from points to general geometric objects, i.e., polytopes and/or balls, and extend our algorithms to solve the generalized SP and ESM problems in O(nN^d) and O(nN^{d+1}) time, respectively. Finally, we present some applications of our algorithms to stochastic convex-hull related problems.

Hadoop, employing the MapReduce programming paradigm, has been widely accepted as the standard framework for analyzing big data in distributed environments. Unfortunately, this rich framework was not truly exploited towards processing large-scale computational geometry operations. This paper introduces CG_Hadoop; a suite of scalable and efficient MapReduce algorithms for various fundamental computational geometry problems, namely, polygon union, skyline, convex hull, farthest pair, and closest pair, which present a set of key components for other geometric algorithms. For each computational geometry operation, CG_Hadoop has two versions, one for the Apache Hadoop system and one for the SpatialHadoop system; a Hadoop-based system that is more suited for spatial operations. These proposed algorithms form a nucleus of a comprehensive MapReduce library of computational geometry operations. Extensive experimental results on a cluster of 25 machines of datasets up to 128GB show that CG_Hadoop achieves up to 29x and 260x better performance than traditional algorithms when using Hadoop and SpatialHadoop systems, respectively.