(geometry, physics, engineering, of an object or a geometrical figure) The point at which gravitational force (or other universally and uniformly acting force) may be supposed to act on a given rigid, uniformly dense body; the centre of gravity or centre of mass.
- operatorname Centroid(𝒳)=(∫xg(x)dx)/(∫g(x)dx) (6)
where the integrals are taken over the whole space ℝⁿ, and g is the characteristic function of the subset, which is 1 inside 𝒳 and 0 outside it [27].
(geometry, specifically, of a triangle) The point of intersection of the three medians of a given triangle; the point whose (Cartesian) coordinates are the arithmetic mean of the coordinates of the three vertices.
(of a finite set of points) the point whose (Cartesian) coordinates are the arithmetic mean of the coordinates of a given finite set of points.
(mathematical analysis, of a function) An analogue of the centre of gravity of a nonuniform body in which local density is replaced by a specified function (which can take negative values) and the place of the body's shape is taken by the function's domain.
- The centroid of an arbitrary function f is given by #92;frac#123;#92;intxf(x)dx#125;#123;#92;intf(x)dx#125;, where the integrals are calculated over the domain of f.
(statistics, cluster analysis, of a cluster of points) the arithmetic mean (alternatively, median) position of a cluster of points in a coordinate system based on some application-dependent measure of distance.
(graph theory, of a tree) Given a tree of n nodes, either (1) a unique node whose removal would split the tree into subtrees of fewer than n/2 nodes, or (2) either of a pair of adjacent nodes such that removal of the edge connecting them would split the tree into two subtrees of exactly n/2 nodes.
- 1974 [Prentice-Hall], Narsingh Deo, Graph Theory with Applications to Engineering and Computer Science, 2017, Dover, page 248,
Just as in the case of centers of a tree (Section 3-4), it can be shown that every tree has either one centroid or two centroids. It can also be shown that if a tree has two centroids, the centroids are adjacent.
- 2009, Hao Yuan, Patrick Eugster, An Efficient Algorithm for Solving the Dyck-CFL Reachability Problem on Trees, Giuseppe Castagna (editor), Programming Languages and Systems: 18th European Symposium, Proceedings, Springer, LNCS 5502, page 186,
A node x in a tree T is called a centroid of T if the removal of x will make the size of each remaining connected component no greater than |T|/2. A tree may have at most two centroids, and if there are two then one must be a neighbor of the other [6, 5]. Throughout this paper, we specify the centroid to be the one whose numbering is lexicographically smaller (i.e., we number the nodes from 1 to n). There exists a linear time algorithm to compute the centroid of a tree due to the work of Goldman [21]. We use operatorname CT(T) to denote the centroid of T computed by the linear time algorithm.