Untangled Monotonic Chains and Adaptive Range Search


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Abstract

We present the first adaptive data structure for two-dimensional orthogonal range search. Our data structure is adaptive in the sense that it gives improved search performance for data with more inherent sortedness. Given n points on the plane, the linear-space data structure can answer range queries in O(log(n)+k+m) time, where m is the number of points in the output and k is the minimum number of monotonic chains into which the point set can be decomposed, which is O(sqrt(n)) in the worst case. Our result matches the worst-case performance of other optimal-time linear-space data structures, or surpasses them when k=o(sqrt(n)). Our data structure can also be made implicit, requiring no extra space beyond that of the data points themselves, in which case the query time becomes O(k log n + m). We present a novel algorithm of independent interest to decompose a point set into a minimum number of untangled, same-direction monotonic chains in O(kn+n log{n}) time.


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