Skew Jensen-Bregman Voronoi diagrams

Abstract

A Jensen-Bregman divergence is a distortion measure defined by a Jensen convexity gap induced by a strictly convex functional generator. Jensen-Bregman divergences unify the squared Euclidean and Mahalanobis distances with the celebrated information-theoretic Jensen-Shannon divergence, and can further be skewed to include Bregman divergences in limit cases. We study the geometric properties and combinatorial complexities of both the Voronoi diagrams and the centroidal Voronoi diagrams induced by such as class of divergences. We show that Jensen-Bregman divergences occur in two contexts: (1) when symmetrizing Bregman divergences, and (2) when computing the Bhattacharyya distances of statistical distributions. Since the Bhattacharyya distance of popular parametric exponential family distributions in statistics can be computed equivalently as Jensen-Bregman divergences, these skew Jensen-Bregman Voronoi diagrams allow one to define a novel family of statistical Voronoi diagrams. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.