Offline orthogonal range counting implementation - r

Question

It seems that a statistical problem that I am working on requires doing something known in computational geometry as "offline orthogonal range counting":
Suppose I have a set of n points (for the moment, in the plane). For every pair of points i and j, I would like to count the number of remaining points in the set that are in the rectangle whose diagonal is the segment with endpoints i and j. The overall output then is a vector of n(n-1) values each in [0, 1, 2, ... , n-2].
I've seen that a rich literature on the problem (or at least a very similar problem) exists, but I cannot find an implementation. I would prefer an R (a statistical computing language) package, but I guess that's asking too much. An open source C/C++ implementation will also work.
Thanks.

Answer 1

I hope I understand well your proble. Here an implementation in R using package geometry. I use
mesh.drectangle function which compute a signed distance from points p to boundary of rectangle.
I create a combination for all points using combn
for each point p of combination , I compute the distance from the rectangle rect_p to the others points
if distance < 0 I choose the points.
For example
library(geometry)
## I generate some data
set.seed(1234)
p.x <- sample(1:100,size=30,replace=T)
p.y <- sample(1:100,size=30,replace=T)
points <- cbind(p.x,p.y)
## the algortithm
ll <- combn(1:nrow(points),2,function(x){
x1<- p.x[x[1]]; y1 <- p.y[x[1]]
x2<- p.x[x[2]]; y2 <- p.y[x[2]]
p <- points[-x,]
d <- mesh.drectangle(p,x1,y1,x2,y2)
res <- NA
if(length(which(d <0))){
points.in = as.data.frame(p,ncol=2)[ d < 0 , ]
res <- list(n = nrow(points.in),
rect = list(x1=x1,x2=x2,y1=y1,y2=y2),
points.in = points.in)
}
res
},simplify=F)
ll <- ll[!is.na(ll)]
## the result
nn <- do.call(rbind,lapply(ll,'[[','n'))
To visualize the results, I plots rectangles with 5 points for example.
library(grid)
grid.newpage()
vp <- plotViewport(xscale = extendrange(p.x),
yscale = extendrange(p.y))
pushViewport(vp)
grid.xaxis()
grid.yaxis()
grid.points(x=points[,'p.x'],y=points[,'p.y'],pch='*')
cols <- rainbow(length(ll))
ll <- ll[nn == 5] ## here I plot only the rectangle with 5 points
lapply(seq_along(ll),function(i){
x <- ll[[i]]
col <- sample(cols,1)
x1<- x$rect$x1; x2<- x$rect$x2
y1<- x$rect$y1; y2<- x$rect$y2
grid.rect(x=(x1+x2)*.5,y=(y1+y2)*.5,
width= x2-x1,height = y2-y1,
default.units ='native',
gp=gpar(fill=col,col='red',alpha=0.2)
)
grid.points(x=x$points.in$p.x,y=x$points.in$p.y,pch=19,
gp=gpar(col=rep(col,x$n)))
}
)
upViewport()