Given a set of points with x, y and z coordinates whose bounds are 0 to 1 (inclusive), determine if they're all uniformly distributed (or close to) - math

Question

I'm trying to determine whether a set of points are uniformly distributed in a 1 x 1 x 1 cube. Each point comes with an x, y, and z coordinate that corresponds to their location in the cube.
A trivial way that I can think of is to flatten the set of points into 2 graphs and check how normally distributed both are however I do not know whether that's a correct way of doing so.
Anyone else has any idea?

Answer 1

I would compute point density map and then check for anomalies in it:
definitions
let assume we have N points to test. If the points are uniformly distributed then they should form "uniform grid" of mmm points:
m * m * m = N
m = N^(1/3)
To account for disturbances from uniform grid and asses statistics you need to divide your cube to grid of cubes where each cube will hold several points (so statistical properties could be computed) let assume k>=5 points per grid cube so:
cubes = m/k
create a 3D array of counters
simply we need integer counter per each grid cube so:
int map[cubes][cubes][cubes];
fill it with zeroes.
process all points p(x,y,z) and update map[][][]
Simply loop through all of your points, and compute grid cube position they belong to and update their counter by incrementing it.
map[x*(cubes-1)][y*(cubes-1)][z*(cubes-1)]++;
compute average count of the map[][][]
simple average like this will do:
avg=0;
for (xx=0;xx<cubes;xx++)
for (yy=0;yy<cubes;yy++)
for (zz=0;zz<cubes;zz++)
avg+=map[xx][yy][zz];
avg/=cubes*cubes*cubes;
now just compute abs distance to this average
d=0;
for (xx=0;xx<cubes;xx++)
for (yy=0;yy<cubes;yy++)
for (zz=0;zz<cubes;zz++)
d+=fabs(map[xx][yy][zz]-avg);
d/=cubes*cubes*cubes;
the d will hold a metric telling how far are the points from uniform density. Where 0 means uniform distribution. So just threshold it ... the d is also depending on the number of points and my intuition tells me d>=k means totally not uniform so if you want to make it more robust you can do something like this (the threshold might need tweaking):
d/=k;
if (d<0.25) uniform;
else nonuniform;
As you can see all this is O(N) time so it should be fast enough for you. If it isn't you can evaluate every 10th point by skipping points however that can be done only if the order of points is random. If not you would need to pick N/10 random points instead. The 10 might be any constant but you need to take in mind you still need enough points to process so the statistic results are representing your set so I would not go below 250 points (but that depends on what exactly you need)
Here few of my answers using density map technique:
Finding holes in 2d point sets?
Location of highest density on a sphere