For the sake of simplicity, lets say I have a bunch of 2d points, each have X and Y. The points are distributed somewhat randomly but not completely, they will be biased to be closer to the world center (where ever that might be, completely random) and they are likely to have some kind of a shape. You can imagine that like a bunch of stars forming a galaxy around a black hole...Now I need to process these points (each of them have a lot of calculations) and to optimize the processing, it would greatly help if I knew whether they were north of most of the other points or south, east or west and nort/south more or less than east/west. The exact specifity of the distribution is not important, right now I'm imagining 8 sectors (NNE, NEE, SEE, SSE, SSW, SWW, NWW, NNW like on the map).2 simple but incomplete solutions to this are:average the position of all the points creating the center of the collection and compare the position of each point to that. This has 2 problems. For one, 99% of the points could be in a tight circular group while one point could be waay far out somewhere. This would shift the center towards that point and in the worst case scenario, the 99% of the points would only be distributed between 2 sectors. Second problem is that the distribution doesn't have to be circular, they are just as likely to show up in the shape of a giraffe. Due to the long neck on the giraffe, the Y amplitude would be much greater than X so the processing will be incorrectly biased 50% of the time between X or Y.Also compare the x and y of each point to a global min/max creating a bounding box, the bounding box can then be used to normalize x/y distribution but would suffer even more from the one lone point that could be way out there.So in essence, I'm looking for a way to find the average position and the bounding box without being affected by the potential flyaway. The quality of those 2 pieces of data would be defined as follows: After cutting the BB into 8 sectors like a pie originating from the center point, if a point is assigned to the NNE sector for example then the greatest percentage of other points must be towards its souththe second greatest towards its westthe third greatest towards its eastand least amount of points towards its northAny ideas?
Practical bounding box?
computational geometry;statistics