Exact Uniform L1 Spacing for Solow-Polasky Diversity on Lines and Ordered Pareto Fronts
Abstract
We study fixed-cardinality maximization of the inverse-matrix Solow--Polasky diversity, equivalently finite metric magnitude for the exponential kernel, on one-dimensional and ordered metric sets. The analysis starts from the known finite-line gap formula for the exponential kernel, which writes the excess inverse-matrix diversity as a sum of functions of consecutive gaps. Building on this formula, the main interval theorem proves that, for every , the unique maximizing -point subset of is the equally spaced set. Thus the objective selects a uniform gap representation on the real line. A converse kernel proposition shows that, among normalized non-increasing distance kernels, requiring the corresponding adjacent-gap additive structure forces the exponential family. Further results transfer the interval theorem to ordered (L1, or Manhattan) curves by isometry: the maximizing sets are uniform in accumulated length. As a consequence, monotone biobjective Pareto fronts admit Solow--Polasky optimal finite approximations that are uniformly spaced in accumulated objective-space change, a natural representation when all parts of a continuous front should be covered. Examples, including a dense connected front and a finite disconnected ZDT3 front, illustrate how the continuous uniform-gap result appears on discrete candidate sets. Solow-Polasky diversity; diversity measures; finite metric magnitude; L1 distance; uniform spacing; Pareto-front approximation; multiobjective optimization; fixed-cardinality subset selection
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.21922,
title = {Exact Uniform L1 Spacing for Solow-Polasky Diversity on Lines and Ordered Pareto Fronts},
author = {Michael T. M. Emmerich and Mahboubeh Nezhadmoghaddam and Jesús Guillermo Falcón Cardona},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.21922},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
14 Pages, 2 figures