Balanced Partitions of Vector Sequences

Abstract

Let $d, r \in \N$, $\|\cdot\|$ any norm on $\R^d$ and $B$ denote the unit ball with respect to this norm. We show that any sequence $v_1,v_2,...$ of vectors in $B$ can be partitioned into $r$ subsequences $V_1, ..., V_r$ in a balanced manner with respect to the partial sums: For all $n \in \N$, $\ell \le r$, we have $\|\sum_{i \le k, v_i \in V_\ell} v_i - \tfrac 1r \sum_{i \le k} v_i\| \le 2.0005 d$. A similar bound holds for partitioning sequences of vector sets. Both results extend an earlier one of B\'ar\'any and Grinberg (1981) to partitions in arbitrarily many classes.