Phase transition for the volume of high-dimensional random polytopes

Abstract

The beta polytope $P_{n,d}^\beta$ is the convex hull of $n$ i.i.d. random points distributed in the unit ball of $\mathbb{R}^d$ according to a density proportional to $(1-\lVert{x}\rVert^2)^{\beta}$ if $\beta>-1$ (in particular, $\beta=0$ corresponds to the uniform distribution in the ball), or uniformly on the unit sphere if $\beta=-1$. We show that the expected normalized volumes of high-dimensional beta polytopes exhibit a phase transition and we describe its shape. We derive analogous results for the intrinsic volumes of beta polytopes and, when $\beta=0$, their number of vertices.