Lower bounds for k-distance approximation

Abstract: Consider a set P of N random points on the unit sphere of dimension $d-1$, and the symmetrized set S = P union (-P). The halving polyhedron of S is defined as the convex hull of the set of centroids of N distinct points in S. We prove that after appropriate rescaling this halving polyhedron is Hausdorff close to the unit ball with high probability, as soon as the number of points grows like $Omega(d log(d))$. From this result, we deduce probabilistic lower bounds on the complexity of approximations of the distance to the empirical measure on the point set by distance-like functions.