Asymptotic bounds on the combinatorial diameter of random polytopes

The combinatorial diameter $\operatorname{diam}(P)$ of a polytope $P$ is the maximum shortest path distance between any pair of vertices. In this paper, we provide upper and lower bounds on the combinatorial diameter of a random "spherical" polytope, which is tight to within one factor of dimension when the number of inequalities is large compared to the dimension. More precisely, for an $n$-dimensional polytope $P$ defined by the intersection of $m$ i.i.d.\ half-spaces whose normals are chosen uniformly from the sphere, we show that $\operatorname{diam}(P)$ is $\Omega(n m^{\frac{1}{n-1}})$ and $O(n^2 m^{\frac{1}{n-1}} + n^5 4^n)$ with high probability when $m \geq 2^{\Omega(n)}$. For the upper bound, we first prove that the number of vertices in any fixed two dimensional projection sharply concentrates around its expectation when $m$ is large, where we rely on the $\Theta(n^2 m^{\frac{1}{n-1}})$ bound on the expectation due to Borgwardt [Math. Oper. Res., 1999]. To obtain the diameter upper bound, we stitch these ``shadows paths'' together over a suitable net using worst-case diameter bounds to connect vertices to the nearest shadow. For the lower bound, we first reduce to lower bounding the diameter of the dual polytope $P^\circ$, corresponding to a random convex hull, by showing the relation $\operatorname{diam}(P) \geq (n-1)(\operatorname{diam}(P^\circ)-2)$. We then prove that the shortest path between any ``nearly'' antipodal pair vertices of $P^\circ$ has length $\Omega(m^{\frac{1}{n-1}})$.

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