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Whitaker, Ross T.

Publications and source records attributed to Whitaker, Ross T..

Adaptive and Unstructured Mesh Cleaving

We propose a new strategy for boundary conforming meshing that decouples the problem of building tetrahedra of proper size and shape from the problem of conforming to complex, nonmanifold boundaries. This approach is motivated by the observation that while several methods exist for adaptive tetrahedral meshing, they typically have difficulty at geometric boundaries. The proposed strategy avoids this conflict by extracting the boundary conforming constraint into a secondary step. We first build a background mesh having a desired set of tetrahedral properties, and then use a generalized stenciling method to divide, or “cleave”, these elements to get a set of conforming tetrahedra, while limiting the impacts cleaving has on element quality. In developing this new framework, we make several technical contributions including a new method for building graded tetrahedral meshes as well as a generalization of the isosurface stuffing and lattice cleaving algorithms to unstructured background meshes.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Morse-Smale Regression

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97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Morse–Smale Regression

This paper introduces a novel partition-based regression approach that incorporates topological information. Partition-based regression typically introduces a quality-of-fit-driven decomposition of the domain. The emphasis in this work is on a topologically meaningful segmentation. Thus, the proposed regression approach is based on a segmentation induced by a discrete approximation of the Morse–Smale complex. This yields a segmentation with partitions corresponding to regions of the function with a single minimum and maximum that are often well approximated by a linear model. This approach yields regression models that are amenable to interpretation and have good predictive capacity. Typically, regression estimates are quantified by their geometrical accuracy. For the proposed regression, an important aspect is the quality of the segmentation itself. Thus, this article introduces a new criterion that measures the topological accuracy of the estimate. The topological accuracy provides a complementary measure to the classical geometrical error measures and is very sensitive to overfitting. The Morse–Smale regression is compared to state-of-the-art approaches in terms of geometry and topology and yields comparable or improved fits in many cases. Finally, a detailed study on climate-simulation data demonstrates the application of the Morse–Smale regression. Supplementary Materials are available online and contain an implementation of the proposed approach in the R package msr, an analysis and simulations on the stability of the Morse–Smale complex approximation, and additional tables for the climate-simulation study.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗