Random points in halfspheres

Abstract

A random spherical polytope $P_n$ in a spherically convex set $K \subset S^d$ as considered here is the spherical convex hull of $n$ independent, uniformly distributed random points in $K$. The behaviour of $P_n$ for a spherically convex set $K$ contained in an open halfsphere is quite similar to that of a similarly generated random convex polytope in a Euclidean space, but the case when $K$ is a halfsphere is different. This is what we investigate here, establishing the asymptotic behaviour, as $n$ tends to infinity, of the expectation of several characteristics of $P_n$, such as facet and vertex number, volume and surface area. For the Hausdorff distance from the halfsphere, we obtain also some almost sure asymptotic estimates.