Approximations of Points: Combinatorics and Algorithms

At the core of successful manipulation and computation over large geometric data is the notion of approximation, both structural and computational. The focus of this thesis will be on the combinatorial and algorithmic aspects of approximations of point-set data P in d-dimensional Euclidean space. It starts with a study of geometric data depth where the goal is to compute a point which is the 'combinatorial center' of P. Over the past 50 years several such measures of combinatorial centers have been proposed, and we will re-examine several of them: Tukey depth, Simplicial depth, Oja depth and Ray-Shooting depth. This can be generalized to approximations with a subset, leading to the notion of epsilon-nets. There we will study the problem of approximations with respect to convexity. Along the way, this requires re-visiting and generalizing some basic theorems of convex geometry, such as the Caratheodory's theorem. Finally we will turn to the algorithmic aspects of these problems. We present a polynomial-time approximation scheme for computing hitting-sets for disks in the plane. Of separate interest is the technique, an analysis of local-search via locality graphs. A further application of this technique is then presented in computing independent sets in intersection graphs of rectangles in the plane