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Map matching is a common task when analysing GPS tracks, such as vehicle trajectories. The goal is to match a recorded noisy polygonal curve to a path on the map, usually represented as a geometric graph. The Fr\'echet distance is a commonly used metric for curves, making it a natural fit. The map-matching problem is well-studied, yet until recently no-one tackled the data structure question: preprocess a given graph so that one can query the minimum Fr\'echet distance between all graph paths and a polygonal curve. Recently, Gudmundsson, Seybold, and Wong [SODA 2023, arXiv:2211.02951] studied this problem for arbitrary query polygonal curves and $c$-packed graphs. In this paper, we instead require the graphs to be $\lambda$-low-density $t$-spanners, which is significantly more representative of real-world networks. We also show how to report a path that minimises the distance efficiently rather than only returning the minimal distance, which was stated as an open problem in their paper., Comment: This is an extended version of the article published in SoCG 2024, doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2024.27. 15 pages, 4 figures

Spanner constructions focus on the initial design of the network. However, networks tend to improve over time. In this paper, we focus on the improvement step. Given a graph and a budget $k$, which $k$ edges do we add to the graph to minimise its dilation? Gudmundsson and Wong [TALG'22] provided the first positive result for this problem, but their approximation factor is linear in $k$. Our main result is a $(2 \sqrt[r]{2} \ k^{1/r},2r)$-bicriteria approximation that runs in $O(n^3 \log n)$ time, for all $r \geq 1$. In other words, if $t^*$ is the minimum dilation after adding any $k$ edges to a graph, then our algorithm adds $O(k^{1+1/r})$ edges to the graph to obtain a dilation of $2rt^*$. Moreover, our analysis of the algorithm is tight under the Erd\H{o}s girth conjecture., Comment: To appear in ESA 2024

The free space diagram is a popular tool to compute the well-known Fr\'echet distance. As the Fr\'echet distance is used in many different fields, many variants have been established to cover the specific needs of these applications. Often, the question arises whether a certain pattern in the free space diagram is "realizable", i.e., whether there exists a pair of polygonal chains whose free space diagram corresponds to it. The answer to this question may help in deciding the computational complexity of these distance measures, as well as allowing to design more efficient algorithms for restricted input classes that avoid certain free space patterns. Therefore, we study the inverse problem: Given a potential free space diagram, do there exist curves that generate this diagram? Our problem of interest is closely tied to the classic Distance Geometry problem. We settle the complexity of Distance Geometry in $\mathbb{R}^{> 2}$, showing $\exists\mathbb{R}$-hardness. We use this to show that for curves in $\mathbb{R}^{\ge 2}$, the realizability problem is $\exists\mathbb{R}$-complete, both for continuous and for discrete Fr\'echet distance. We prove that the continuous case in $\mathbb{R}^1$ is only weakly NP-hard, and we provide a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm and show that it is fixed-parameter tractable. Interestingly, for the discrete case in $\mathbb{R}^1$, we show that the problem becomes solvable in polynomial time., Comment: 26 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, International Symposium on Algorithms And Computations (ISAAC 2023)

We study the problem of constructing a data structure that can store a two-dimensional polygonal curve $P$, such that for any query segment $\overline{ab}$ one can efficiently compute the Fr\'{e}chet distance between $P$ and $\overline{ab}$. First we present a data structure of size $O(n \log n)$ that can compute the Fr\'{e}chet distance between $P$ and a horizontal query segment $\overline{ab}$ in $O(\log n)$ time, where $n$ is the number of vertices of $P$. In comparison to prior work, this significantly reduces the required space. We extend the type of queries allowed, as we allow a query to be a horizontal segment $\overline{ab}$ together with two points $s, t \in P$ (not necessarily vertices), and ask for the Fr\'{e}chet distance between $\overline{ab}$ and the curve of $P$ in between $s$ and $t$. Using $O(n\log^2n)$ storage, such queries take $O(\log^3 n)$ time, simplifying and significantly improving previous results. We then generalize our results to query segments of arbitrary orientation. We present an $O(nk^{3+\varepsilon}+n^2)$ size data structure, where $k \in [1..n]$ is a parameter the user can choose, and $\varepsilon > 0$ is an arbitrarily small constant, such that given any segment $\overline{ab}$ and two points $s, t \in P$ we can compute the Fr\'{e}chet distance between $\overline{ab}$ and the curve of $P$ in between $s$ and $t$ in $O((n/k)\log^2n+\log^4 n)$ time. This is the first result that allows efficient exact Fr\'{e}chet distance queries for arbitrarily oriented segments. We also present two applications of our data structure: we show that we can compute a local $\delta$-simplification (with respect to the Fr\'{e}chet distance) of a polygonal curve in $O(n^{5/2+\varepsilon})$ time, and that we can efficiently find a translation of an arbitrary query segment $\overline{ab}$ that minimizes the Fr\'{e}chet distance with respect to a subcurve of $P$.

The Fr\'echet distance is a popular metric for curves; however, its bottleneck character is a disadvantage in many applications. Here we introduce two variants of the Fr\'echet distance to cope with this problem and expand the work on shortcut Fr\'echet distances. We present an efficient algorithm for computing the new distance measure.

We study variants of the mean problem under the $p$-Dynamic Time Warping ($p$-DTW) distance, a popular and robust distance measure for sequential data. In our setting we are given a set of finite point sequences over an arbitrary metric space and we want to compute a mean point sequence of given length that minimizes the sum of $p$-DTW distances, each raised to the $q$\textsuperscript{th} power, between the input sequences and the mean sequence. In general, the problem is $\mathrm{NP}$-hard and known not to be fixed-parameter tractable in the number of sequences. On the positive side, we show that restricting the length of the mean sequence significantly reduces the hardness of the problem. We give an exact algorithm running in polynomial time for constant-length means. We explore various approximation algorithms that provide a trade-off between the approximation factor and the running time. Our approximation algorithms have a running time with only linear dependency on the number of input sequences. In addition, we use our mean algorithms to obtain clustering algorithms with theoretical guarantees.

We present an algorithm for computing $\epsilon$-coresets for $(k, \ell)$-median clustering of polygonal curves in $\mathbb{R}^d$ under the Fr\'echet distance. This type of clustering is an adaption of Euclidean $k$-median clustering: we are given a set of $n$ polygonal curves in $\mathbb{R}^d$, each of complexity (number of vertices) at most $m$, and want to compute $k$ median curves such that the sum of distances from the given curves to their closest median curve is minimal. Additionally, we restrict the complexity of the median curves to be at most $\ell$ each, to suppress overfitting, a problem specific for sequential data. Our algorithm has running time linear in $n$, sub-quartic in $m$ and quadratic in $\epsilon^{-1}$. With high probability it returns $\epsilon$-coresets of size quadratic in $\epsilon^{-1}$ and logarithmic in $n$ and $m$. We achieve this result by applying the improved $\epsilon$-coreset framework by Langberg and Feldman to a generalized $k$-median problem over an arbitrary metric space. Later we combine this result with the recent result by Driemel et al. on the VC dimension of metric balls under the Fr\'echet distance. Furthermore, our framework yields $\epsilon$-coresets for any generalized $k$-median problem where the range space induced by the open metric balls of the underlying space has bounded VC dimension, which is of independent interest. Finally, we show that our $\epsilon$-coresets can be used to improve the running time of an existing approximation algorithm for $(1,\ell)$-median clustering.

We study the problem of decomposing (i.e. partitioning and covering) polygons into components that are $\alpha$-fat, which means that the aspect ratio of each subpolygon is at most $\alpha$. We consider decompositions without Steiner points. We present a polynomial-time algorithm for simple polygons that finds the minimum $\alpha$ such that an $\alpha$-fat partition exists. Furthermore, we show that finding an $\alpha$-fat partition or covering with minimum cardinality is NP-hard for polygons with holes.

In 2015, Driemel, Krivo\v{s}ija and Sohler introduced the $(k,\ell)$-median problem for clustering polygonal curves under the Fr\'echet distance. Given a set of input curves, the problem asks to find $k$ median curves of at most $\ell$ vertices each that minimize the sum of Fr\'echet distances over all input curves to their closest median curve. A major shortcoming of their algorithm is that the input curves are restricted to lie on the real line. In this paper, we present a randomized bicriteria-approximation algorithm that works for polygonal curves in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and achieves approximation factor $(1+\epsilon)$ with respect to the clustering costs. The algorithm has worst-case running-time linear in the number of curves, polynomial in the maximum number of vertices per curve, i.e. their complexity, and exponential in $d$, $\ell$, $\epsilon$ and $\delta$, i.e., the failure probability. We achieve this result through a shortcutting lemma, which guarantees the existence of a polygonal curve with similar cost as an optimal median curve of complexity $\ell$, but of complexity at most $2\ell-2$, and whose vertices can be computed efficiently. We combine this lemma with the superset-sampling technique by Kumar et al. to derive our clustering result. In doing so, we describe and analyze a generalization of the algorithm by Ackermann et al., which may be of independent interest.

We give algorithms to compute the Fr\'echet distance of trees and graphs with bounded tree width. Our algorithms run in $O(n^2)$ time for trees of bounded degree, and $O(n^2\sqrt{n \log n})$ time for trees of arbitrary degree. For graphs of bounded tree width we show one can compute the Fr\'echet distance in FPT (fixed parameter tractable) time.

For a set of curves, Ahn et al. introduced the notion of a middle curve and gave algorithms computing these with run time exponential in the number of curves. Here we study the computational complexity of this problem: we show that it is NP-complete and give approximation algorithms.

In this paper, we consider different constrained partition problems for weighted trees and cactus graphs. We focus on the (l,u)-partition problem, which is the problem of partitioning a weighted graph into connected clusters such that each cluster fulfills the lower and upper weight constraints l and u. Partitioning into a minimum, maximum or a fixed number of clusters is known to be NP-hard in general, but polynomial-time solvable on trees. We prove that these three variants of the (l,u)-partition problem can be solved for cactus graphs as well by presenting a polynomial-time algorithm. Additionally, we present an efficient method to compute the corresponding partitions. For other optimization goals or additional constraints, the partition problem becomes NP-hard - even on trees and for a lower weight bound equal to zero. We show that our method can be used as an algorithmic framework to solve other partition problems for weighted trees and cactus graphs with a pseudopolynomial runtime.

We introduce a new distance measure for comparing polygonal chains: the $k$-Fr\'echet distance. As the name implies, it is closely related to the well-studied Fr\'echet distance but detects similarities between curves that resemble each other only piecewise. The parameter $k$ denotes the number of subcurves into which we divide the input curves. The $k$-Fr\'echet distance provides a nice transition between (weak) Fr\'echet distance and Hausdorff distance. However, we show that deciding this distance measure turns out to be NP-complete, which is interesting since both (weak) Fr\'echet and Hausdorff distance are computable in polynomial time. Nevertheless, we give several possibilities to deal with the hardness of the $k$-Fr\'echet distance: besides an exponential-time algorithm for the general case, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for $k=2$, i.e., we ask that we subdivide our input curves into two subcurves each. We also present an approximation algorithm that outputs a number of subcurves of at most twice the optimal size. Finally, we give an FPT algorithm using parameters $k$ (the number of allowed subcurves) and $z$ (the number of segments of one curve that intersects the $\varepsilon$-neighborhood of a point on the other curve).

We introduce new distance measures for comparing straight-line embedded graphs based on the Fr\'echet distance and the weak Fr\'echet distance. These graph distances are defined using continuous mappings and thus take the combinatorial structure as well as the geometric embeddings of the graphs into account. We present a general algorithmic approach for computing these graph distances. Although we show that deciding the distances is NP-hard for general embedded graphs, we prove that our approach yields polynomial time algorithms if the graphs are trees, and for the distance based on the weak Fr\'echet distance if the graphs are planar embedded. Moreover, we prove that deciding the distances based on the Fr\'echet distance remains NP-hard for planar embedded graphs and show how our general algorithmic approach yields an exponential time algorithm and a polynomial time approximation algorithm for this case., Comment: 27 pages, 14 Figures

We introduce the concept of compactly representing a large number of state sequences, e.g., sequences of activities, as a flow diagram. We argue that the flow diagram representation gives an intuitive summary that allows the user to detect patterns among large sets of state sequences. Simplified, our aim is to generate a small flow diagram that models the flow of states of all the state sequences given as input. For a small number of state sequences we present efficient algorithms to compute a minimal flow diagram. For a large number of state sequences we show that it is unlikely that efficient algorithms exist. More specifically, the problem is W[1]-hard if the number of state sequences is taken as a parameter. We thus introduce several heuristics for this problem. We argue about the usefulness of the flow diagram by applying the algorithms to two problems in sports analysis. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms on a football data set and generated data., Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures

We study the shortcut Fr\'{e}chet distance, a natural variant of the Fr\'{e}chet distance, that allows us to take shortcuts from and to any point along one of the curves. The classic Fr\'echet distance is a bottle-neck distance measure and hence quite sensitive to outliers. The shortcut Fr\'{e}chet distance allows us to cut across outliers and hence produces significantly more meaningful results when dealing with real world data. Driemel and Har-Peled recently described approximation algorithms for the restricted case where shortcuts have to start and end at input vertices. We show that, in the general case, the problem of computing the shortcut Fr\'{e}chet distance is NP-hard. This is the first hardness result for a variant of the Fr\'{e}chet distance between two polygonal curves in the plane. We also present two algorithms for the decision problem: a 3-approximation algorithm for the general case and an exact algorithm for the vertex-restricted case. Both algorithms run in O(n^3 log n) time.

All known algorithms for the Fr\'echet distance between curves proceed in two steps: first, they construct an efficient oracle for the decision version; second, they use this oracle to find the optimum from a finite set of critical values. We present a novel approach that avoids the detour through the decision version. This gives the first quadratic time algorithm for the Fr\'echet distance between polygonal curves in $R^d$ under polyhedral distance functions (e.g., $L_1$ and $L_\infty$). We also get a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation of the Fr\'echet distance under the Euclidean metric, in quadratic time for any fixed $\varepsilon > 0$. For the exact Euclidean case, our framework currently yields an algorithm with running time $O(n^2 \log^2 n)$. However, we conjecture that it may eventually lead to a faster exact algorithm., Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures; a preliminary version appeared at ESA 2013

The collective motion of a set of moving entities like people, birds, or other animals, is characterized by groups arising, merging, splitting, and ending. Given the trajectories of these entities, we define and model a structure that captures all of such changes using the Reeb graph, a concept from topology. The trajectory grouping structure has three natural parameters that allow more global views of the data in group size, group duration, and entity inter-distance. We prove complexity bounds on the maximum number of maximal groups that can be present, and give algorithms to compute the grouping structure efficiently. We also study how the trajectory grouping structure can be made robust, that is, how brief interruptions of groups can be disregarded in the global structure, adding a notion of persistence to the structure. Furthermore, we showcase the results of experiments using data generated by the NetLogo flocking model and from the Starkey project. The Starkey data describe the movement of elk, deer, and cattle. Although there is no ground truth for the grouping structure in this data, the experiments show that the trajectory grouping structure is plausible and has the desired effects when changing the essential parameters. Our research provides the first complete study of trajectory group evolvement, including combinatorial, algorithmic, and experimental results.

Given two polygonal curves in the plane, there are many ways to define a notion of similarity between them. One popular measure is the Fr\'echet distance. Since it was proposed by Alt and Godau in 1992, many variants and extensions have been studied. Nonetheless, even more than 20 years later, the original $O(n^2 \log n)$ algorithm by Alt and Godau for computing the Fr\'echet distance remains the state of the art (here, $n$ denotes the number of edges on each curve). This has led Helmut Alt to conjecture that the associated decision problem is 3SUM-hard. In recent work, Agarwal et al. show how to break the quadratic barrier for the discrete version of the Fr\'echet distance, where one considers sequences of points instead of polygonal curves. Building on their work, we give a randomized algorithm to compute the Fr\'echet distance between two polygonal curves in time $O(n^2 \sqrt{\log n}(\log\log n)^{3/2})$ on a pointer machine and in time $O(n^2(\log\log n)^2)$ on a word RAM. Furthermore, we show that there exists an algebraic decision tree for the decision problem of depth $O(n^{2-\varepsilon})$, for some $\varepsilon > 0$. We believe that this reveals an intriguing new aspect of this well-studied problem. Finally, we show how to obtain the first subquadratic algorithm for computing the weak Fr\'echet distance on a word RAM., Comment: 34 pages, 15 figures. A preliminary version appeared in SODA 2014

The Frechet distance is a metric to compare two curves, which is based on monotonous matchings between these curves. We call a matching that results in the Frechet distance a Frechet matching. There are often many different Frechet matchings and not all of these capture the similarity between the curves well. We propose to restrict the set of Frechet matchings to "natural" matchings and to this end introduce locally correct Frechet matchings. We prove that at least one such matching exists for two polygonal curves and give an O(N^3 log N) algorithm to compute it, where N is the total number of edges in both curves. We also present an O(N^2) algorithm to compute a locally correct discrete Frechet matching.

A constant-workspace algorithm has read-only access to an input array and may use only O(1) additional words of $O(\log n)$ bits, where $n$ is the size of the input. We assume that a simple $n$-gon is given by the ordered sequence of its vertices. We show that we can find a triangulation of a plane straight-line graph in $O(n^2)$ time. We also consider preprocessing a simple polygon for shortest path queries when the space constraint is relaxed to allow $s$ words of working space. After a preprocessing of $O(n^2)$ time, we are able to solve shortest path queries between any two points inside the polygon in $O(n^2/s)$ time., Comment: Preprint appeared in EuroCG 2012

A \emph{binary tanglegram} is a drawing of a pair of rooted binary trees whose leaf sets are in one-to-one correspondence; matching leaves are connected by inter-tree edges. For applications, for example, in phylogenetics, it is essential that both trees are drawn without edge crossings and that the inter-tree edges have as few crossings as possible. It is known that finding a tanglegram with the minimum number of crossings is NP-hard and that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to that number. We prove that under the Unique Games Conjecture there is no constant-factor approximation for binary trees. We show that the problem is NP-hard even if both trees are complete binary trees. For this case we give an $O(n^3)$-time 2-approximation and a new, simple fixed-parameter algorithm. We show that the maximization version of the dual problem for binary trees can be reduced to a version of MaxCut for which the algorithm of Goemans and Williamson yields a 0.878-approximation., Comment: Journal version

We give lower bounds for the combinatorial complexity of the Voronoi diagram of polygonal curves under the discrete Frechet distance. We show that the Voronoi diagram of n curves in R^d with k vertices each, has complexity Omega(n^{dk}) for dimension d=1,2 and Omega(n^{d(k-1)+2}) for d>2., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures

A suitable measure for the similarity of shapes represented by parameterized curves or surfaces is the Fr\'echet distance. Whereas efficient algorithms are known for computing the Fr\'echet distance of polygonal curves, the same problem for triangulated surfaces is NP-hard. Furthermore, it remained open whether it is computable at all. Here, using a discrete approximation we show that it is {\em upper semi-computable}, i.e., there is a non-halting Turing machine which produces a monotone decreasing sequence of rationals converging to the result. It follows that the decision problem, whether the Fr\'echet distance of two given surfaces lies below some specified value, is recursively enumerable. Furthermore, we show that a relaxed version of the problem, the computation of the {\em weak Fr\'echet distance} can be solved in polynomial time. For this, we give a computable characterization of the weak Fr\'echet distance in a geometric data structure called the {\em free space diagram}.