Optimal configurations of lines and a statistical application

Abstract

Motivated by the construction of confidence intervals in statistics, we study optimal configurations of $2^d-1$ lines in real projective space $RP^{d-1}$. For small $d$, we determine line sets that numerically minimize a wide variety of potential functions among all configurations of $2^d-1$ lines through the origin. Numerical experiments verify that our findings enable to assess efficiently the tightness of a bound arising from the statistical literature.