Efficient Nonparametric Estimation of 3D Point Cloud Signals through Distributed Learning

Advancements in technology have elevated the prominence of 3D point cloud data, making its analysis increasingly vital across various applications. This need drives the demand for advanced statistical analytic approaches to handle challenges such as size, sparsity, and irregularity in 3D point clouds while ensuring accurate and efficient information extraction. This article introduces a novel nonparametric distributed (NPD) learning framework that uses trivariate spline smoothing over a triangulation of domain. The proposed NPD algorithm features a straightforward, scalable, and communication-efficient implementation scheme that can achieve near-linear speedup. In addition, we provide rigorous theoretical support for the NPD estimation framework and demonstrate that the NPD spline estimators attain the same convergence rate as the global spline estimators obtained using the entire dataset and achieve the optimal nonparametric convergence rate established by Stone under some regularity conditions. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed NPD method, we conduct simulation studies comparing it with several global nonparametric estimation methods used to smooth the 3D data. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the NPD method in accurately and efficiently processing and learning from 3D point clouds, highlighting its potential to advance large and complex data analysis. Supplementary material, which contains related technical details, proofs of the theoretical results, and additional results in simulation studies, is available online.