Planar earthmover is not in L1

Assaf Naor, Gideon Schechtman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We show that any L1 embedding of the transportation cost (a.k.a. Earthmover) metric on probability measures supported on the grid {0,1,..., n}2 ⊆ ℝ2 incurs distortion Ω (√log n). We also use Fourier analytic techniques to construct a simple L1 embedding of this space which has distortion O(log n).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)804-826
Number of pages23
JournalSIAM Journal on Computing
Volume37
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007

Keywords

  • Earthmover metric
  • Metric embeddings
  • Nearest neighbor search

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Computer Science
  • General Mathematics

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