Comparing DNA and protein sequence groups plays an important role in biological evolutionary relationship research. Despite many methods available for sequence comparison, only a few can be used for group comparison. In this study, we propose a novel approach using convex hulls. We use statistical information contained within the sequences to represent each sequence as a point in high dimensional space. We find that the points belonging to one biological group are located in a different region of space than points belonging to other biological groups. To be more precise, the convex hull of the points from one group are disjoint from the convex hulls of points from other groups. This finding allows us to do phylogenetic analysis for groups in an efficient way. Five different theorems are presented for checking whether two convex hulls intersect or are disjoint. Test results for datasets related to HRV, HPV, Ebolavirus, PKC and protein phosphatase domains demonstrate that our method performs well and provides a new tool for studying group phylogeny. More significantly, the convex analysis presents a new way to search for sequences belonging to a biological group by examining points within the group’s convex hull.

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In the research of computer vision and machine perception, 3D objects are usually represented by 2-manifold triangular meshes M. In this paper, we present practical and efficient algorithms to construct iso-contours, bisectors, and Voronoi diagrams of point sites onM, based on an exact geodesic metric. Compared to euclidean metric spaces, the Voronoi diagrams onMexhibit many special properties that fail all of the existing euclidean Voronoi algorithms. To provide practical algorithms for constructing geodesicmetric- based Voronoi diagrams onM, this paper studies the analytic structure of iso-contours, bisectors, and Voronoi diagrams onM. After a necessary preprocessing of model M, practical algorithms are proposed for quickly obtaining full information about iso-contours, bisectors, and Voronoi diagrams on M. The complexity of the construction algorithms is also analyzed. Finally, three interesting applications—surface sampling and reconstruction, 3D skeleton extraction, and point pattern analysis—are presented that show the potential power of the proposed algorithms in pattern analysis.

Mean-Field Games are games with a continuum of players that incorporate the time-dimension through a control-theoretic approach. Recently, simpler approaches relying on the Best Reply Strategy have been proposed. They assume that the agents navigate their strategies towards their goal by taking the direction of steepest descent of their cost function (i.e. the opposite of the utility function). In this paper, we explore the link between Mean-Field Games and the Best Reply Strategy approach. This is done by introducing a Model Predictive Control framework, which consists of setting the Mean-Field Game over a short time interval which recedes as time moves on. We show that the Model Predictive Control offers a compromise between a possibly unrealistic Mean-Field Game approach and the sub-optimal Best Reply Strategy.