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

Let $p\in[1,\infty]$. Consider the projection of a uniform random vector from a suitably normalized $\ell^p$ ball in $\mathbb{R}^n$ onto an independent random vector from the unit sphere. We show that sequences of such random projections, when suitably normalized, satisfy a large deviation principle (LDP) as the dimension $n$ goes to $\infty$, which can be viewed as an annealed LDP. We also establish a quenched LDP (conditioned on a fixed sequence of projection directions) an...

The paper provides a description of the large deviation behavior for the Euclidean norm of projections of $\ell_p^n$-balls to high-dimensional random subspaces. More precisely, for each integer $n\geq 1$, let $k_n\in\{1,\ldots,n-1\}$, $E^{(n)}$ be a uniform random $k_n$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb R^n$ and $X^{(n)}$ be a random point that is uniformly distributed in the $\ell_p^n$-ball of $\mathbb R^n$ for some $p\in[1,\infty]$. Then the Euclidean norms $\|P_{E^{(n)}}X^{...

We show that the two-dimensional minimum-volume central section of the $n$-dimensional cross-polytope is attained by the regular $2n$-gon. We establish stability-type results for hyperplane sections of $\ell_p$-balls in all the cases where the extremisers are known. Our methods are mainly probabilistic, exploring connections between negative moments of projections of random vectors uniformly distributed on convex bodies and volume of their sections.

Let $X$ be an isotropic random vector in $R^d$ that satisfies that for every $v \in S^{d-1}$, $\|<X,v>\|_{L_q} \leq L \|<X,v>\|_{L_p}$ for some $q \geq 2p$. We show that for $0<\varepsilon<1$, a set of $N = c(p,q,\varepsilon) d$ random points, selected independently according to $X$, can be used to construct a $1 \pm \varepsilon$ approximation of the $L_p$ unit ball endowed on $R^d$ by $X$. Moreover, $c(p,q,\varepsilon) \leq c^p \varepsilon^{-2}\log(2/\varepsilon)$; when $q=2...

We prove a large deviations principle for orthogonal projections of the unit ball $\mathbb{B}_p^n$ of $\ell_p^n$ onto a random $k$-dimensional linear subspace of $\mathbb{R}^n$ as $n\to\infty$ in the case $2<p\le \infty$ and for the intersection of $\mathbb{B}_p^n$ with a random $k$-dimensional subspace in the case $1\le p <2$. The corresponding rate function is finite only on $L_q$-zonoids and their duals, respectively, and given in terms of the maximum entropy over suitable...

The symmetric convex hull of random points that are independent and distributed according to the cone probability measure on the $\ell_p$-unit sphere of $\mathbb R^n$ for some $1\leq p < \infty$ is considered. We prove that these random polytopes have uniformly absolutely bounded isotropic constants with overwhelming probability. This generalizes the result for the Euclidean sphere ($p=2$) obtained by D. Alonso-Guti\'errez. The proof requires several different tools including...

We establish Central Limit Theorems for the volumes of intersections of $B_{p}^n$ (the unit ball of $\ell_p^n$) with uniform random subspaces of codimension $d$ for fixed $d$ and $n\to \infty$. As a corollary we obtain higher order approximations for expected volumes, refining previous results by Koldobsky and Lifschitz and approximations obtained from the Eldan--Klartag version of CLT for convex bodies. We also obtain a Central Limit Theorem for the Minkowski functional of t...

The purpose of this note is to present several aspects of concentration phenomena in high dimensional geometry. At the heart of the study is a geometric analysis point of view coming from the theory of high dimensional convex bodies. The topic has a broad audience going from algorithmic convex geometry to random matrices. We have tried to emphasize different problems relating these areas of research. Another connected area is the study of probability in Banach spaces where so...

We study a higher-dimensional 'balls-into-bins' problem. An infinite sequence of i.i.d. random vectors is revealed to us one vector at a time, and we are required to partition these vectors into a fixed number of bins in such a way as to keep the sums of the vectors in the different bins close together; how close can we keep these sums almost surely? This question, our primary focus in this paper, is closely related to the classical problem of partitioning a sequence of vecto...

Among all metrics based on p-norms, the Manhattan (p=1), euclidean (p=2) and Chebyshev distances (p=infinity) are the most widely used for their interpretability, simplicity and technical convenience. But these are not the only arguments for the ubiquity of these three p-norms. This article proves that there is a volume-surface correspondence property that is unique to them. More precisely, it is shown that sampling uniformly from the volume of an n-dimensional p-ball and pro...