Metric and Path-Connectedness Properties of the Frechet Distance for Paths and Graphs

Abstract: The Frechet distance is often used to measure distances between paths, with applications in areas ranging from map matching to GPS trajectory analysis to handwriting recognition. More recently, the Frechet distance has been generalized to a distance between two copies of the same graph embedded or immersed in a metric space; this more general setting opens up a wide range of more complex applications in graph analysis. In this paper, we initiate a study of some of the fundamental topological properties of spaces of paths and of graphs mapped to R^n under the Frechet distance, in an effort to lay the theoretical groundwork for understanding how these distances can be used in practice. In particular, we prove whether or not these spaces, and the metric balls therein, are path-connected.