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Statistical distributions of areas of Voronoi cells

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POSTED BY: Vitaliy Kaurov
10 Replies

You may be interested in this paper, which takes a semi-empirical approach to come up with a closed-form approximate formula:

At the time when it was written, Mathematica did not have VoronoiMesh, but one could "trick" it to quickly compute a Voronoi tessellation by using ListDensityPlot with InterpolationOrder -> 0 and extracting the polygons.

POSTED BY: Szabolcs Horvát
Posted 6 years ago

Very Nice. I am aware that the distribution of Lightning strike intensity from a Thunderstorm also closely follows a Gamma Distribution. Could this be due to cells of charge inside the cloud which organise like a Voronoi topology? Does a Gamma distribution also arise from a 3 D distribution of volumes of a Vornoi tesellation?

POSTED BY: BJ Miller
Posted 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing everybody! Maybe this can add some more information:

In the article ["Statistical Distributions of Poisson Voronoi Cells in Two and Three Dimensions"][1] by Masaharu Tanemura, mentioned by Marco Thiel, the distribution of the perimeter of the cells (and the number of edges etc.) is also analyzed. Here I adapted the code of Vitaly to perimeters and we see (as in the article) that now we have a normal distribution:

perimeters = Perimeter /@ vorInner;
hist = Histogram[perimeters, Automatic, "PDF", 
   PlotTheme -> "Detailed"];
dist = FindDistribution[perimeters]
Show[hist, Plot[PDF[dist, x], {x, 0, .1}]]

enter image description here

And for the number of edges, we find a BinomialDistribution with FindDistribution although the result look almost "normal" as we use EstimatedDitribution

numberOfEdges[poly_th[First@poly]
edges = numberOfEdges /@ vorInner;
histE = Histogram[edges, Automatic, "PDF", PlotTheme -> "Detailed"];
distE = EstimatedDistribution[edges, 
  NormalDistribution[\[Mu], \[Sigma]]]
Show[histE, Plot[PDF[distE, x], {x, 0, 12}]]
distEB = FindDistribution[edges]
Plot[CDF[distEB, x], {x, 0, 12}, Filling -> Bottom]

enter image description here

POSTED BY: Erik Mahieu

Great, @Erik, thanks for exploring further and sharing!

POSTED BY: Vitaliy Kaurov
POSTED BY: Marco Thiel
POSTED BY: Vitaliy Kaurov

I don't find it all that surprising that the result is a Gamma distribution. The 1-d case is well known as it is the distribution of interarrival times of a Poisson process and is exponentially distributed. The exponential distribution is a special case of the Gamma so maybe you're onto something.

POSTED BY: Carlo Barbieri

Very nice. Thanks for sharing. Some years ago I did this with 10^9 cells. If I recall correctly the left side is a bit higher (more probably) than a gamma distribution.

To remove any edge-effects, what people do is: take random points in a square, and then copy the square 9 times in a 3*3 grid, such as to emulate period boundary conditions. Then take only the polygons which center is in the center unit square…

Great stuff!

–SH

POSTED BY: Sander Huisman

Thanks! Awesome idea about edge-effects! Did you estimate any analytical models beyond Gamma or it was just pure empirical thing?

POSTED BY: Vitaliy Kaurov

I looked at different things: how many sides, angles, area, perimeter, and many conditionally averaged quantities. But area of the PDF as well. But no analytical shape is known for it. I believe that there is something known for perimeter.

POSTED BY: Sander Huisman
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