We consider quantitative versions of Helly-type questions, that is, instead of finding a point in the intersection, we bound the volume of the intersection. Our first main geometric result is a quantitative version of the Fractional Helly Theorem of Katchalski and Liu, the second one is a quantitative version of the $(p,q)$-Theorem of Alon and Kleitman.
We study versions of Helly's theorem that guarantee that the intersection of a family of convex sets in $R^d$ has a large diameter. This includes colourful, fractional and $(p,q)$ versions of Helly's theorem. In particular, the fractional and $(p,q)$ versions work with conditions where the corresponding Helly theorem does not. We also include variants of Tverberg's theorem, Bárány's point selection theorem and the existence of weak epsilon-nets for convex sets with diameter estimates.
Research on Helly-type theorems in combinatorial convex geometry has produced volumetric versions of Helly's theorem using witness sets and quantitative extensions of Doignon's theorem. This paper combines these philosophies and presents quantitative Helly-type theorems for the integer lattice with axis-parallel boxes as witness sets. Our main result shows that, while quantitative Helly numbers for the integer lattice grow polynomially in each fixed dimension, their variants with boxes as witness sets are uniformly bounded. We prove several colorful and fractional variations on this theorem. W…
This paper presents sixteen quantitative versions of the classic Tverberg, Helly, & Caratheodory theorems in combinatorial convexity. Our results include measurable or enumerable information in the hypothesis and the conclusion. Typical measurements include the volume, the diameter, or the number of points in a lattice.
We introduce a new variant of quantitative Helly-type theorems: the minimal \emph{"homothetic distance"} of the intersection of a family of convex sets to the intersection of a subfamily of a fixed size. As an application, we establish the following quantitative Helly-type result for the \emph{diameter}. If $K$ is the intersection of finitely many convex bodies in $\mathbb{R}^d$, then one can select $2d$ of these bodies whose intersection is of diameter at most $(2d)^3\mathrm{diam}(K)$. The best previously known estimate, due to Brazitikos, is $c d^{11/2}$. Moreover, we confirm that the multip…
Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a family of $n$ axis-parallel boxes in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and $α\in (1-1/d,1]$ a real number. There exists a real number $β(α)>0$ such that if there are $α{n\choose 2}$ intersecting pairs in $\mathcal{F}$, then $\mathcal{F}$ contains an intersecting subfamily of size $βn$. A simple example shows that the above statement is best possible in the sense that if $α\leq 1-1/d$, then there may be no point in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that belongs to more than $d$ elements of $\mathcal{F}$.
A Helly-type theorem for diameter provides a bound on the diameter of the intersection of a finite family of convex sets in $\mathbb{R}^d$ given some information on the diameter of the intersection of all sufficiently small subfamilies. We prove fractional and colorful versions of a longstanding conjecture by Bárány, Katchalski, and Pach. We also show that a Minkowski norm admits an exact Helly-type theorem for diameter if and only if its unit ball is a polytope and prove a colorful version for those that do. Finally, we prove Helly-type theorems for the property of ``containing $k$ colinear i…
Brazitikos' results on quantititative Helly-type theorems (for the volume and for the diameter) rely on the work of Srivastava on sparsification of John's decompositions. We change this technique by a stronger recent result due to Friedland and Youssef. This, together with an appropriate selection in the accuracy of the approximation, allow us to obtain Helly-type versions which are sensitive to the number of convex sets involved.
We prove variations of Carathéodory's, Helly's and Tverberg's theorems where the sets involved are measured according to continuous functions such as the volume or diameter. Among our results, we present continuous quantitative versions of Lovász's colorful Helly theorem, Bárány's colorful Carathéodory's theorem, and the colorful Tverberg theorem.
We prove the following sparse approximation result for polytopes. Assume that $Q$ is a polytope in John's position. Then there exist at most $2d$ vertices of $Q$ whose convex hull $Q'$ satisfies $Q \subseteq - 2d^2 \, Q'$. As a consequence, we retrieve the best bound for the quantitative Helly-type result for the volume, achieved by Brazitikos, and improve on the strongest bound for the quantitative Helly-type theorem for the diameter, shown by Ivanov and Naszódi: We prove that given a finite family $\mathcal{F}$ of convex bodies in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with intersection $K$, we may select at most $…
We provide a new quantitative version of Helly's theorem: there exists an absolute constant $α>1$ with the following property: if $\{P_i: i\in I\}$ is a finite family of convex bodies in ${\mathbb R}^n$ with ${\rm int}\left (\bigcap_{i\in I}P_i\right )\neq\emptyset $, then there exist $z\in {\mathbb R}^n$, $s\leq αn$ and $i_1,\ldots i_s\in I$ such that \begin{equation*} z+P_{i_1}\cap\cdots\cap P_{i_s}\subseteq cn^{3/2}\left(z+\bigcap_{i\in I}P_i\right), \end{equation*} where $c>0$ is an absolute constant. This directly gives a version of the "quantitative" diameter theorem of Bárány, Katchalsk…
We prove a no-dimensional version of Carathédory's theorem: given an $n$-element set $P\subset \Re^d$, a point $a \in \conv P$, and an integer $r\le d$, $r \le n$, there is a subset $Q\subset P$ of $r$ elements such that the distance between $a$ and $\conv Q$ is less than $\diam P/\sqrt {2r}$. A general no-dimension Helly type result is also proved with colourful and fractional consequences. Similar versions of Tverberg's theorem and some of their extensions are also established.
Given a subset S of R^n, let c(S,k) be the smallest number t such that whenever finitely many convex sets have exactly k common points in S, there exist at most t of these sets that already have exactly k common points in S. For S = Z^n, this number was introduced by Aliev et al. [2014] who gave an explicit bound showing that c(Z^n,k) = O(k) holds for every fixed n. Recently, Chestnut et al. [2015] improved this to c(Z^n,k) = O(k (log log k)(log k)^{-1/3} ) and provided the lower bound c(Z^n,k) = Omega(k^{(n-1)/(n+1)}). We provide a combinatorial description of c(S,k) in terms of polytopes wit…
We prove several exact quantitative versions of Helly's and Tverberg's theorems, which guarantee that a finite family of convex sets in $R^d$ has a large intersection. Our results characterize conditions that are sufficient for the intersection of a family of convex sets to contain a "witness set" which is large under some concave or log-concave measure. The possible witness sets include ellipsoids, zonotopes, and $H$-convex sets. Our results also bound the complexity of finding the best approximation of a family of convex sets by a single zonotope or by a single $H$-convex set. We obtain colo…
We show quantitative versions of classic results in discrete geometry, where the size of a convex set is determined by some non-negative function. We give versions of this kind for the selection theorem of Bárány, the existence of weak epsilon-nets for convex sets and the $(p,q)$ theorem of Alon and Kleitman. These methods can be applied to functions such as the volume, surface area or number of points of a discrete set. We also give general quantitative versions of the colorful Helly theorem for continuous functions.
This paper presents a new variation of Tverberg's theorem. Given a discrete set $S$ of $R^d$, we study the number of points of $S$ needed to guarantee the existence of an $m$-partition of the points such that the intersection of the $m$ convex hulls of the parts contains at least $k$ points of $S$. The proofs of the main results require new quantitative versions of Helly's and Carathéodory's theorems.
The famous Doignon-Bell-Scarf Theorem is a Helly-type result about the existence of integer solutions on systems of linear inequalities. The purpose of this paper is to present the following quantitative generalization: Given an integer $k$, we prove that there exists a constant $c(n,k)$, depending only on the dimension $n$ and $k$, such that if a polyhedron ${x: Ax \leq b}$ contains exactly k integer solutions, then there exists a subset of the rows, of cardinality no more than $c(n,k)$, defining a polyhedron that contains exactly the same $k$ integer points. In this case $c(n,0) = 2^n$ is th…