It's not at all obvious whether this function has multiple (local) minima --- in which case it may be nontrivial to compute. Almost certainly, the sum of the squares of the distances would be more tractable. What relation might these definitions bear to the convex hull stripping algorithm mentioned earlier? WFL On 12/3/07, Steve Witham <sw@tiac.net> wrote:
My friend Richard Harter redefined my median in what may be a nicer way:
We use the sum of absolute distances function,
f(x) = sum(abs(x-x_i))
and find the set of x's such f(x) is a minimum. All of these are valid medians; however the centroid of the set is in some sense the most central median.
--Steve
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun