Counting faces of randomly-projected polytopes when the projection radically lowers dimension

1.1. Three surprises of high dimensions. This paper develops asymptotic methods to count faces of random high-dimensional polytopes; a seemingly dry and unpromising pursuit. Yet our conclusions have surprising implications - in statistics, probability, information theory, and signal processing - with potential impacts in practical subjects like medical imaging and digital communications. Before involving the reader in our lengthy analysis of high-dimensional face counting, we describe three implications of our results. 1.1.1. Convex Hulls of Gaussian Point Clouds. Consider a random point cloud of n points xi, i = 1, . . . , n, sampled independently and identically from a Gaussian distribution in R d with nonsingular covariance. This is a standard model of multivariate data; its properties are increasingly important in a wide range of applications. At the same time, it is an attractive and in some sense timeless object for theoretical study. Properties of the convex hull of the random point cloud X = {xi} have attracted interest for several decades, increasingly so in recent years; there is a nowvoluminous literature on the subject. The results could be significant for understanding outlier detection, or classification problems in machine learning.