English

Star Discrepancy Subset Selection: Problem Formulation and Efficient Approaches for Low Dimensions

Computational Geometry 2022-01-05 v2 Data Structures and Algorithms Numerical Analysis Numerical Analysis

Abstract

Motivated by applications in instance selection, we introduce the star discrepancy subset selection problem, which consists of finding a subset of m out of n points that minimizes the star discrepancy. First, we show that this problem is NP-hard. Then, we introduce a mixed integer linear formulation (MILP) and a combinatorial branch-and-bound (BB) algorithm for the star discrepancy subset selection problem and we evaluate both approaches against random subset selection and a greedy construction on different use-cases in dimension two and three. Our results show that the MILP and BB are efficient in dimension two for large and small m/nm/n ratio, respectively, and for not too large n. However, the performance of both approaches decays strongly for larger dimensions and set sizes. As a side effect of our empirical comparisons we obtain point sets of discrepancy values that are much smaller than those of common low-discrepancy sequences, random point sets, and of Latin Hypercube Sampling. This suggests that subset selection could be an interesting approach for generating point sets of small discrepancy value.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.07881,
  title  = {Star Discrepancy Subset Selection: Problem Formulation and Efficient Approaches for Low Dimensions},
  author = {François Clèment and Carola Doerr and Luís Paquete},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.07881},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:20:01.692Z