Shallow cuttings are a fundamental tool in computational geometry and spatial databases for solving offline and online range searching problems. For a set P of N points in 3-D, at SODA'14, Afshani and Tsakalidis designed an optimal O (N log₂N) time algorithm that constructs shallow cuttings for 3-D dominance ranges in internal memory. Even though shallow cuttings are used in the I/O-model to design space and query efficient range searching data structures, an efficient construction of them is not known till now. In this paper, we design an optimal-cost algorithm to construct shallow cuttings for 3-D dominance ranges. The number of I/Os performed by the algorithm is O (N/B log₌/₁ (N/B) ), where B is the block size and M is the memory size. As two applications of the optimal-cost construction algorithm, we design fast algorithms for offline 3-D dominance reporting and offline 3-D approximate dominance counting. We believe that our algorithm will find further applications in offline 3-D range searching problems and in improving construction cost of data structures for 3-D range searching problems.
Nekrich et al. (Thu,) studied this question.