Multidimensional Included and Excluded Sums

TL;DR

This paper introduces three new algorithms for multidimensional included and excluded sums, outperforming classical methods in both theoretical complexity and empirical performance, with applications in scientific computing like the fast multipole method.

Contribution

The paper presents three novel algorithms for strong and weak included/excluded sums that improve asymptotic complexity and empirical performance over existing solutions.

Findings

BDBS algorithm solves strong included-sums in Θ(d N), outperforming SAT.

Box-complement algorithm solves strong excluded-sums in Θ(d N), beating corners algorithm.

BDBSC algorithm solves weak excluded-sums in Θ(d N), outperforming box-complement with an inverse operator.

Abstract

This paper presents algorithms for the included-sums and excluded-sums problems used by scientific computing applications such as the fast multipole method. These problems are defined in terms of a $d$-dimensional array of $N$ elements and a binary associative operator~$\oplus$ on the elements. The included-sum problem requires that the elements within overlapping boxes cornered at each element within the array be reduced using $\oplus$. The excluded-sum problem reduces the elements outside each box. The weak versions of these problems assume that the operator $\oplus$ has an inverse $\ominus$, whereas the strong versions do not require this assumption. In addition to studying existing algorithms to solve these problems, we introduce three new algorithms. The bidirectional box-sum (BDBS) algorithm solves the strong included-sums problem in $\Theta(d N)$ time, asymptotically beating the classical summed-area table (SAT) algorithm, which runs in $\Theta(2^d N)$ and which only solves the weak version of the problem. Empirically, the BDBS algorithm outperforms the SAT algorithm in higher dimensions by up to $17.1\times$. The \defn{box-complement} algorithm can solve the strong excluded-sums problem in $\Theta(d N)$ time, asymptotically beating the state-of-the-art corners algorithm by Demaine et al., which runs in $\Omega(2^d N)$ time. In 3 dimensions the box-complement algorithm empirically outperforms the corners algorithm by about $1.4\times$ given similar amounts of space. The weak excluded-sums problem can be solved in $\Theta(d N)$ time by the bidirectional box-sum complement (BDBSC) algorithm, which is a trivial extension of the BDBS algorithm. Given an operator inverse $\ominus$, BDBSC can beat box-complement by up to a factor of $4$.