Re: VisAD 3D surface graph performance

Hi Lezlie,

Unfortunately, neither DelaunayWatson nor DelaunayClarkson are 100% robust. I'm sorry to hear about your problems. Most problems are due to colocated or colinear points, or closely clumped values if using DelaunayClarkson. To avoid closely clumped values, the Delaunay.scale method is provided to scale up the data. To avoid colocated and colinear points, the Delaunay.perturb method is provided to randomly perturb data points by a small value (hopefully small enough to avoid altering the Delaunay triangulation).

It has been several years since I worked on the Delaunay algorithms, and since I ported them from C, I did not need to fully understand them. I know that MAXDIM in DelaunayClarkson provides an upper bound on the dimensionality the algorithm can handle. Since you are working with data of no more than three dimensions, changing yours to MAXDIM=4 should not pose a problem for you. However, both of your problems (DelaunayWatson throwing an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException and DelaunayClarkson depending on the version of MAXDIM) are certainly not the intended behavior.

If you can send me any sample datasets with some code to duplicate the problems (perhaps one for DelaunayWatson and one for DelaunayClarkson), I would be willing to investigate further. I would like DelaunayWatson and DelaunayClarkson to be as robust as possible.

Thanks,
-Curtis

Lezlie Fort wrote:

Hi Curtis,

I apologize for the second mailing, but I wanted to let you know that I believe I was able to find the cause (sort of) of the "data flattening" problem that I described in my last e-mail. Given the fact that the only difference between my working graphs and the failing graph was the amount of data (as opposed to the data itself, since identical data was being rendered differently), I began to suspect that some of the initial variable settings in the first part of DelaunayClarkson.java might be contributing to the problem. After tweaking some of them, I noticed that when I changed the "MAXDIM" value from 8 to 9, the graph that had previously rendered correctly now failed with the same "flattening" behaviour I had noticed before. Suspicious, I lowered the value from 9 to 7 and re-ran the application. Now, both of the graphs rendered correctly. Additionally, the graph that had previously been failing (it had taken about 22 seconds to render) now rendered successfully in 16 seconds. As a stopgap for now, I have altered my version of DelaynayClarkson.java to set MAXDIM to 4. This is the only change that I have made, and so far all of my data seems to be rendering correctly (I received some additional data today, and that rendered successfully, as well). I've examined the code, but not being overly familiar with triangulation algorithms, I am unable to get a complete handle on the (seemingly) multipurpose function of the MAXDIM value. Am I endangering the sanity of my application by altering the value as I have? Is there an explanation for why a simple change in this variable can have such drastic effects on the generated graph output?

Thanks very much,
lzf
Lezlie Fort wrote:

Hi Curtis,

I have run across a few questions this weekend that have me banging my head against the wall. I'm hoping that you might be able to address some of them. To provide some background: The application that I am writing is designed to graph data that falls within a user-specified time range. Every day, I have received a new batch of data, and have generated both 3D spacial graphs and 3D line graphs. All has been well. However, over the weekend, I received another batch of data, and I plugged it into the app as usual. This particular batch was larger than the others (obviously, since everything is cumulative). The generated 3D spacial graph was nothing like those that I had seen on the previous days. Most of the surfaces were flattened out - with absolutely no variation. Initially, I presumed that the problem was caused by the fact that I had probably crossed the Delaunay Watson/Clarkson boundary that you described in your previous post. After all, before the problem, my total data set was < 3000. After the problem, it was >3000. When I started delving into the situation, however, I discovered that I have /never/ been using DelaunayWatson at all (even for the <3000 cases). When DelaunayWatson was called, an error was always generated, and the DelaunayFactory method fell back to using DelaunayClarkson. The error has always been silent, so I never realized that it was occurring until I started debugging the code and stepping through it. My first approach was to figure out why the error was generated during DelaunayWatson execution. The problem always seemed to be due to an "array out of bounds" exception that occurred during the portion of the code that builds the triangle vertices and components. However, the data set was exactly the same as that used "successfully" by Clarkson. It basically consists of a sample of type float[][], where the first dimension is the number of domain dimensions (in my case, 2), and the second is the length of each domain vector. This seemed correct to me, so I was (and am still) unable to determine why the DelaunayWatson routine fails consistently.

So my next thought was to somehow adjust the Clarkson algorithm so that it doesn't round to the nearest integer. This was the only explanation I could think of for the sudden "flat" surfaces generated with my most recent plot. But that explanation still doesn't account for the fact that I am building on the same data day by day. On previous days, the same data that appears flat on the final day's graph was nicely varied. Why, then, would it suddenly flatten out when the data points have not changed? I know I must be missing something quite obvious, but it continues to elude me.

Do you have any ideas on any of these problems?

   1. Why would DelaunayWatson fail on a sample type described above?
   2. Why would Clarkson suddenly decide to flatten out data that was
previously nicely varied? 3. Since I can't seem to use DelaunayWatson successfully, is there
      a change I can make to DelaunayClarkson.java to prevent the
      problem described in (2), above?

Any help that you could provide would be very much appreciated. Until this weekend, things have been going quite well, but I find that I've suddenly crashed into a brick wall. At this point, I don't trust the output of DelaunayClarkson enough to use it at all for 3D surface graph generation, but I am unable to successfully generate a surface graph any other way.

Thanks for any assistance,
lzf



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