Computing the Center of Uncertain Points on Tree Networks

Abstract

Uncertain data has been very common in many applications. In this paper, we consider the one-center problem for uncertain data on tree networks. In this problem, we are given a tree T and n (weighted) uncertain points each of which has m possible locations on T associated with probabilities. The goal is to find a point x∗ on T such that the maximum (weighted) expected distance from x∗ to all uncertain points is minimized. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been studied before. We propose a refined prune-and-search technique that solves the problem in linear time.