Optimal (Euclidean) Metric Compression

Abstract: We study the problem of representing all distances between $n$ points in $\mathbb R^d$, with arbitrarily small distortion, using as few bits as possible. We give asymptotically tight bounds for this problem, for Euclidean metrics, for $\ell_1$ (a.k.a.~Manhattan) metrics, and for general metrics. Our bounds for Euclidean metrics mark the first improvement over compression schemes based on discretizing the classical dimensionality reduction theorem of Johnson and Lindenstrauss (Contemp.~Math.~1984). Since it is known that no better dimension reduction is possible, our results establish that Euclidean metric compression is possible beyond dimension reduction.