In this paper we initiate the study of tropical Voronoi diagrams. We start out with investigating bisectors of finitely many points with respect to arbitrary polyhedral norms. For this more general scenario we show that bisectors of three points are homeomorphic to a non-empty open subset of Euclidean space, provided that certain degenerate cases are excluded. Specializing our results to tropical bisectors then yields structural results and algorithms for tropical Voronoi diagrams.
We characterize the topological configurations of points and lines that may arise when placing n points on a circle and drawing the n perpendicular bisectors of the sides of the corresponding convex cyclic n-gon. We also provide exact and asymptotic formulas describing a random realizable configuration, obtained either by sampling the points uniformly at random on the circle or by sampling a realizable configuration uniformly at random.
Tropical curves in $mathbb{R}^2$ correspond to metric planar graphs but not all planar graphs arise in this way. We describe several new classes of graphs which cannot occur. For instance, this yields a full combinatorial characterization of the tropically planar graphs of genus at most five.
We study the amortized number of combinatorial changes (edge insertions and removals) needed to update the graph structure of the Voronoi diagram $mathcal{V}(S)$ (and several variants thereof) of a set $S$ of $n$ sites in the plane as sites are added. We define a general update operation for planar graphs modeling the incremental construction of several variants of Voronoi diagrams as well as the incremental construction of an intersection of halfspaces in $mathbb{R}^3$. We show that the amortized number of edge insertions and removals needed to add a new site is $O(sqrt{n})$. A matching $Omega(sqrt{n})$ combinatorial lower bound is shown, even in the case where the graph of the diagram is a tree. This contrasts with the $O(log{n})$ upper bound of Aronov et al. (2006) for farthest-point Voronoi diagrams when the points are inserted in order along their convex hull. We present a semi-dynamic data structure that maintains the Voronoi diagram of a set $S$ of $n$ sites in convex position. This structure supports the insertion of a new site $p$ and finds the asymptotically minimal number $K$ of edge insertions and removals needed to obtain the diagram of $S cup {p}$ from the diagram of $S$, in time $O(K,mathrm{polylog} n)$ worst case, which is $O(sqrt{n};mathrm{polylog} n)$ amortized by the aforementioned result. The most distinctive feature of this data structure is that the graph of the Voronoi diagram is maintained at all times and can be traversed in the natural way; this contrasts with other known data structures supporting nearest neighbor queries. Our data structure supports general search operations on the current Voronoi diagram, which can, for example, be used to perform point location queries in the cells of the current Voronoi diagram in $O(log n)$ time, or to determine whether two given sites are neighbors in the Delaunay triangulation.
The Voronoi diagram of a finite set of objects is a fundamental geometric structure that subdivides the embedding space into regions, each region consisting of the points that are closer to a given object than to the others. We may define many variants of Voronoi diagrams depending on the class of objects, the distance functions and the embedding space. In this paper, we investigate a framework for defining and building Voronoi diagrams for a broad class of distance functions called Bregman divergences. Bregman divergences include not only the traditional (squared) Euclidean distance but also various divergence measures based on entropic functions. Accordingly, Bregman Voronoi diagrams allow to define information-theoretic Voronoi diagrams in statistical parametric spaces based on the relative entropy of distributions. We define several types of Bregman diagrams, establish correspondences between those diagrams (using the Legendre transformation), and show how to compute them efficiently. We also introduce extensions of these diagrams, e.g. k-order and k-bag Bregman Voronoi diagrams, and introduce Bregman triangulations of a set of points and their connexion with Bregman Voronoi diagrams. We show that these triangulations capture many of the properties of the celebrated Delaunay triangulation. Finally, we give some applications of Bregman Voronoi diagrams which are of interest in the context of computational geometry and machine learning.
After endowing the space of diagrams of probability spaces with an entropy distance, we study its large-scale geometry by identifying the asymptotic cone as a closed convex cone in a Banach space. We call this cone the tropical cone, and its elements tropical diagrams of probability spaces. Given that the tropical cone has a rich structure, while tropical diagrams are rather flexible objects, we expect the theory of tropical diagrams to be useful for information optimization problems in information theory and artificial intelligence. In a companion article, we give a first application to derive a statement about the entropic cone.