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Computer Science, Computational Geometry, cs.CG
Abstract:
Exploiting geometric structure to improve the asymptotic complexity of
discrete assignment problems is a well-studied subject. In contrast, the
practical advantages of using geometry for such problems have not been
explored. We implement geometric variants of the Hopcroft--Karp algorithm for
bottleneck matching (based on previous work by Efrat el al.) and of the auction
algorithm by Bertsekas for Wasserstein distance computation. Both
implementations use k-d trees to replace a linear scan with a geometric
proximity query. Our interest in this problem stems from the desire to compute
distances between persistence diagrams, a problem that comes up frequently in
topological data analysis. We show that our geometric matching algorithms lead
to a substantial performance gain, both in running time and in memory
consumption, over their purely combinatorial counterparts. Moreover, our
implementation significantly outperforms the only other implementation
available for comparing persistence diagrams.
