Random Polyhedral Cones I: Distributional Results via Gale Duality

TL;DR

This paper derives distributional properties of random polyhedral cones generated by uniform vectors on spheres, revealing symmetries, exact probabilities, and limit laws for face counts, using Gale duality and coupling techniques.

Contribution

It introduces new distributional results for random cones, including symmetry of moments, probability of spherical simplices, and face count limit laws, via Gale duality and explicit couplings.

Findings

Symmetry of moments: m(d,k)=m(k,d)

Exact probability of spherical simplices for small n

Limit distribution of face counts as dimension grows

Abstract

Let $U_1,\ldots,U_n$ be independent random vectors uniformly distributed on the unit sphere $\mathbb S^{d-1}\subseteq\mathbb R^d$, where $n\ge d$, and consider the random polyhedral cone \[ \mathcal W_{n,d}:=\mathop{\mathrm{pos}} (U_1,\ldots,U_n) = \{\lambda_1 U_1+ \ldots + \lambda_n U_n: \lambda_1\geq 0, \ldots, \lambda_n \geq 0\}. \] We establish several distributional results for $\mathcal W_{n,d}$ and the associated spherical polytope $\mathcal W_{n,d}\cap\mathbb S^{d-1}$. Our main contributions include: (i) Let $\alpha_d$ denote the solid angle of $\mathcal W_{d,d}$ and write $m(d,k):=\mathbb E[\alpha_d^k]$ for its $k$-th moment. We prove the symmetry $m(d,k)=m(k,d)$. As an application, we compute $\mathop{\mathrm{Var}}[\alpha_d]=2^{-d}(d+1)^{-1}-4^{-d}$ and derive a closed formula for the third moment. (ii) For $n=d+1,d+2,d+3$ we determine the probability that $\mathcal W_{n,d}\cap\mathbb S^{d-1}$ is a spherical simplex, a spherical analogue of the classical Sylvester problem. In the case $n=d+2$ we also determine the distribution of the number of vertices of $\mathcal W_{d+2,d}\cap\mathbb S^{d-1}$. (iii) Let $f_\ell(\mathcal W_{n,d})$ denote the number of $\ell$-dimensional faces of $\mathcal W_{n,d}$. We prove a distributional limit theorem for $f_\ell(\mathcal W_{n,d})$ in the regime $n=d+k$ and $\ell=d-q$, where $k,q\in\mathbb N$ are fixed and $d\to\infty$. The limit law is a weighted sum of independent chi squared variables, with weights given by explicit eigenvalues of a convolution operator on the sphere. A unifying ingredient is an explicit coupling producing i.i.d. uniform vectors $U_1,\ldots,U_n\in\mathbb S^{d-1}$ together with i.i.d. uniform vectors $V_1,\ldots,V_n\in\mathbb S^{n-d-1}$ whose associated oriented matroids are Gale dual.