A probabilistic approach to the geometry of the \ell_p^n-ball

This survey will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming "Proceedings of the HDP VIII Conference".

Let $\mathbb{B}_p^N$ be the $N$-dimensional unit ball corresponding to the $\ell_p$-norm. For each $N\in\mathbb N$ we sample a uniform random subspace $E_N$ of fixed dimension $m\in\mathbb{N}$ and consider the volume of $\mathbb{B}_p^N$ projected onto $E_N$ or intersected with $E_N$. We also consider geometric quantities other than the volume such as the intrinsic volumes or the dual volumes. In this setting we prove central limit theorems, moderate deviation principles, and ...

The geometry of unit $N$-dimensional $\ell_{p}$ balls has been intensively investigated in the past decades. A particular topic of interest has been the study of the asymptotics of their projections. Apart from their intrinsic interest, such questions have applications in several probabilistic and geometric contexts (Barthe et al. 2005). In this paper, our aim is to revisit some known results of this flavour with a new point of view. Roughly speaking, we will endow the ball w...

In this article we prove three fundamental types of limit theorems for the $q$-norm of random vectors chosen at random in an $\ell_p^n$-ball in high dimensions. We obtain a central limit theorem, a moderate deviations as well as a large deviations principle when the underlying distribution of the random vectors belongs to a general class introduced by Barthe, Gu\'edon, Mendelson, and Naor. It includes the normalized volume and the cone probability measure as well as projectio...

We develop a probabilistic approach to study the volumetric and geometric properties of unit balls $\mathbb B_{q,1}^n$ of finite-dimensional Lorentz sequences spaces $\ell_{q,1}^n$. More precisely, we show that the empirical distribution of a random vector $X^{(n)}$ uniformly distributed on the volume normalized Lorentz ball in $\mathbb R^n$ converges weakly to a compactly supported symmetric probability distribution with explicitly given density; as a consequence we obtain a...

In this paper, we prove a multivariate central limit theorem for $\ell_q$-norms of high-dimensional random vectors that are chosen uniformly at random in an $\ell_p^n$-ball. As a consequence, we provide several applications on the intersections of $\ell_p^n$-balls in the flavor of Schechtman and Schmuckenschl\"ager and obtain a central limit theorem for the length of a projection of an $\ell_p^n$-ball onto a line spanned by a random direction $\theta\in\mathbb S^{n-1}$. The l...

In this paper, we study high-dimensional random projections of $\ell_p^n$-balls. More precisely, for any $n\in\mathbb N$ let $E_n$ be a random subspace of dimension $k_n\in\{1,\ldots,n\}$ and $X_n$ be a random point in the unit ball of $\ell_p^n$. Our work provides a description of the Gaussian fluctuations of the Euclidean norm $\|P_{E_n}X_n\|_2$ of random orthogonal projections of $X_n$ onto $E_n$. In particular, under the condition that $k_n\to\infty$ it is shown that thes...

Sharp large deviation results of Bahadur-Ranga Rao type are provided for the $q$-norm of random vectors distributed on the $\ell _{p}^{n}$-ball ${\mathbb{B}}^{n}_{p}$ according to the cone probability measure or the uniform distribution for $1 \le q<p < \infty $, thereby furthering previous large deviation results by Kabluchko, Prochno and Th\"{a}le in the same setting. These results are then applied to deduce sharp asymptotics for intersection volumes of different $\ell _{p}...

We study the dependence on $\varepsilon$ in the critical dimension $k(n,p,\varepsilon)$ for which one can find random sections of the $\ell_p^n$-ball which are $(1+\varepsilon)$-spherical. We give lower (and upper) estimates for $k(n,p,\varepsilon)$ for all eligible values $p$ and $\varepsilon$ as $n\to \infty$, which agree with the sharp estimates for the extreme values $p=1$ and $p=\infty$. Toward this end, we provide tight bounds for the Gaussian concentration of the $\ell...

We survey results concerning sharp estimates on volumes of sections and projections of certain convex bodies, mainly $\ell_p$ balls, by and onto lower dimensional subspaces. This subject emerged from geometry of numbers several decades ago and since then has seen development of a variety of probabilistic and analytic methods, showcased in this survey.