Fine-Grained Complexity of Earth Mover's Distance under Translation
<|reference_start|>Fine-Grained Complexity of Earth Mover's Distance under Translation: The Earth Mover's Distance is a popular similarity measure in several branches of computer science. It measures the minimum total edge length of a perfect matching between two point sets. The Earth Mover's Distance under Translation ($\mathrm{EMDuT}$) is a translation-invariant version thereof. It minimizes the Earth Mover's Distance over all translations of one point set.   For $\mathrm{EMDuT}$ in $\mathbb{R}^1$, we present an $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^2)$-time algorithm. We also show that this algorithm is nearly optimal by presenting a matching conditional lower bound based on the Orthogonal Vectors Hypothesis. For $\mathrm{EMDuT}$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$, we present an $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^{2d+2})$-time algorithm for the $L_1$ and $L_\infty$ metric. We show that this dependence on $d$ is asymptotically tight, as an $n^{o(d)}$-time algorithm for $L_1$ or $L_\infty$ would contradict the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH). Prior to our work, only approximation algorithms were known for these problems.<|reference_end|>
@article{bringmann2024fine-grained,
    title={Fine-Grained Complexity of Earth Mover's Distance under Translation},
    author={Karl Bringmann, Frank Staals, Karol Wk{e}grzycki, Geert van Wordragen},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.04356},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.04356},
    primaryClass={cs.CG}
}