Approximating Klee's Measure Problem and a Lower Bound for Union Volume Estimation

Union volume estimation is a classical algorithmic problem. Given a family of objects O₁,…,O_n ⊂ ℝ^d, we want to approximate the volume of their union. In the special case where all objects are boxes (also called hyperrectangles) this is known as Klee’s measure problem. The state-of-the-art (1+ε)-approximation algorithm [Karp, Luby, Madras '89] for union volume estimation as well as Klee’s measure problem in constant dimension d uses a total of O(n/ε²) queries of three types: (i) determine the volume of O_i; (ii) sample a point uniformly at random from O_i; and (iii) ask whether a given point is contained in O_i.
First, we show that if an algorithm learns about the objects only through these types of queries, then Ω(n/ε²) queries are necessary. In this sense, the complexity of [Karp, Luby, Madras '89] is optimal. Our lower bound holds even if the objects are equiponderous axis-aligned polygons in ℝ², if the containment query allows arbitrary (not necessarily sampled) points, and if the algorithm can spend arbitrary time and space examining the query responses.
Second, we provide a more efficient approximation algorithm for Klee’s measure problem, which improves the running time from O(n/ε²) to O((n+1/ε²) ⋅ log^{O(d)} (n)). We circumvent our lower bound by exploiting the geometry of boxes in various ways: (1) We sort the boxes into classes of similar shapes after inspecting their corner coordinates. (2) With orthogonal range searching, we show how to sample points from the union of boxes in each class, and how to merge samples from different classes. (3) We bound the amount of wasted work by arguing that most pairs of classes have a small intersection.