This paper addresses the problem of lossy compression of arrangements. Given an arrangement of n lines in the plane, we show how to construct another arrangement consisting of many fewer lines. We give theoretical and empirical bounds to demonstrate the tradeoffs between the size of the new arrangement and the error from lossiness. For the specific application of computing discrepancies of point sets, we demonstrate that speedups by factors of several hundred are possible while introducing small errors. This research has been enabled by various visualization techniques and is accompanied by a video. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.4.m [Information Systems]: Miscellaneous; D.2 [Software]: Software Engineering; D.2.8 [Software Engineering]: Metrics--complexity measures, performance measures
David P. Dobkin, Ayellet Tal