Decomposing arrangements of hyperplanes: VC-dimension, combinatorial dimension, and point location

Abstract: $\renewcommand{\Re}{\mathbb{R}}$ We re-examine parameters for the two main space decomposition techniques---bottom-vertex triangulation, and vertical decomposition, including their explicit dependence on the dimension $d$, and discover several unexpected phenomena, which show that, in both techniques, there are large gaps between the VC-dimension (and primal shatter dimension), and the combinatorial dimension. For vertical decomposition, the combinatorial dimension is only $2d$, the primal shatter dimension is at most $d(d+1)$, and the VC-dimension is at least $1 + d(d+1)/2$ and at most $O(d<sup>3)$. For bottom-vertex triangulation, both the primal shatter dimension and the combinatorial dimension are $\Theta(d<sup>2)$, but there seems to be a significant gap between them, as the combinatorial dimension is $\frac12d(d+3)$, whereas the primal shatter dimension is at most $d(d+1)$, and the VC-dimension is between $d(d+1)$ and $5d² \log{d}$ (for $d\ge 9$). Our main application is to point location in an arrangement of $n$ hyperplanes is $\Re<sup>d$, in which we show that the query cost in Meiser's algorithm can be improved if one uses vertical decomposition instead of bottom-vertex triangulation, at the cost of some increase in the preprocessing cost and storage. The best query time that we can obtain is $O(d^3\log n)$, instead of $O(d^4\log d\log n)$ in Meiser's algorithm. For these bounds to hold, the preprocessing and storage are rather large (super-exponential in $d$). We discuss the tradeoff between query cost and storage (in both approaches, the one using bottom-vertex trinagulation and the one using vertical decomposition).