Optimal Coresets for Hyperbolic Farthest-Point Queries via Ideal-Boundary Envelopes

Abstract

We study coresets for farthest-point queries in hyperbolic space. Given a nonempty finite set $P \subset \mathbb{H}^D$ and $0<\varepsilon \le 1$, we seek a coreset $P_{\varepsilon} \subseteq P$ whose farthest distance from every query point underestimates that of $P$ by at most an additive $\varepsilon$ and retains at least a $1-\varepsilon$ fraction of it. For every fixed $D \ge 2$, we prove that the optimal worst-case coreset size is $Θ\bigl(\varepsilon^{-(D-1)/2}\bigr)$. Our main geometric ingredient is an exact reduction from hyperbolic queries to an upper envelope on the ideal boundary. In the hyperboloid model, each input point induces a positive boundary-score function whose logarithm gives its asymptotic distance offset along geodesic rays. We define the \emph{ideal-boundary envelope} as the pointwise maximum of these functions and prove that the supremum additive loss over all queries equals the maximum logarithmic gap between the input and coreset envelopes. For the upper bound, we move the minimum-enclosing-ball center to the origin and normalize the spatial coordinates, obtaining a bounded Euclidean point set whose boundary envelope is bounded away from zero. A standard Euclidean kernel then approximates all directional score maxima simultaneously, and the structure theorem yields both guarantees. For the lower bound, a spherical packing on a fixed-radius hyperbolic sphere, together with antipodal queries and the hyperbolic cosine law, makes every input point indispensable, matching the upper bound even for either guarantee separately.