Expected dispersion of uniformly distributed points

Abstract

The dispersion of a point set in $[0,1{]}^d$ is the volume of the largest axis parallel box inside the unit cube that does not intersect with the point set. We study the expected dispersion with respect to a random set of $n$ points determined by an i.i.d. sequence of uniformly distributed random variables. Depending on the number of points $n$ and the dimension $d$ we provide an upper and lower bound of the expected dispersion. In particular, we show that the minimal number of points required to achieve an expected dispersion less than $\epsilon \in (0,1)$ depends linearly on the dimension $d$.

13 pages