English

Sub-quadratic (1+\eps)-approximate Euclidean Spanners, with Applications

Computational Geometry 2023-10-10 v1 Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

We study graph spanners for point-set in the high-dimensional Euclidean space. On the one hand, we prove that spanners with stretch <\sqrt{2} and subquadratic size are not possible, even if we add Steiner points. On the other hand, if we add extra nodes to the graph (non-metric Steiner points), then we can obtain (1+\eps)-approximate spanners of subquadratic size. We show how to construct a spanner of size n^{2-\Omega(\eps^3)}, as well as a directed version of the spanner of size n^{2-\Omega(\eps^2)}. We use our directed spanner to obtain an algorithm for computing (1+\eps)-approximation to Earth-Mover Distance (optimal transport) between two sets of size n in time n^{2-\Omega(\eps^2)}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.05315,
  title  = {Sub-quadratic (1+\eps)-approximate Euclidean Spanners, with Applications},
  author = {Alexandr Andoni and Hengjie Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.05315},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

27 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:44:06.216Z